All through the land, there is quiet. The wrinkled brackets are marked with points, circles, x’s, and lines in red. The guy who chose his picks based on the average shoe sizes of the players is counting his winnings in his cubicle while the woman next to him balls up her compare-and-contrast worksheet and angrily hooks it into the wastebasket. When the boss walks by, he mistakes the silence for productivity, when in reality, the post-basketball malaise has set in. The madness is over… or is it?
Florida and Ohio State delivered a decent game. Hard-fought, well-played, though not classic. The Gators own the repeat, and Greg Oden can focus on the draft. The world will spin on for another year. But there’s another game still to be played, featuring a dynasty and an upstart. Pat Summit’s Lady Vols and C. Vivian Stringer’s Scarlet Knights, a number 1 seed and a number 4 seed respectively, will meet in a game that half as many viewers will watch on a network people have to pay for in order to be crowned the champions. Yet both teams are sure to stage a David and Goliath battle that will be worth a water-cooler conversation, if in fact anyone at the water-cooler tunes in.
Basketball is still basketball. The sizes and speeds may differ in the men’s and women’s games, but both generate an electricity in striving towards the same, simple goal which is to get the ball in the basket.
This is the very goal that gets America’s hearts racing every spring and to miss the grand finale in Cleveland on Tuesday night would be true madness.
1 comment:
I appreciate this post. As a Connecticut native I've grown up with NCAA basketball and after the show the UConn women have put on for more than a decade I'm constantly surprised at the ways conversation moves. Since their national championship, which did little to best their female side since the women won one that year too, the UConn men have made headlines more often for their delinquency than their athleticism. The women continue to display exemplary skill, athleticism, and scholarsip, yet, my friends who attend UConn all have season tickets for the MEN's team... That can't even make the tournament this year...
Post a Comment