Four of Twenty-Three

I'm going to make a confession here: I don't really watch basketball games featuring teams I care about, at least when I'm alone. Anything bad happens and I change the channel. Eventually I'll click it back, but only after a few minutes. In a football game, if your team makes a mistake, they go to a TV time out after the score and you've got time to cool off. In baseball, you've got a minute or so before the next hitter comes up, and you can consult the rule book to see how to score the play ("why CAN'T I give him three errors on one play?"). You've got cooling off time. In basketball you don't get this. If time is called, you've got to listen to Billy or Dick explain how great the other team is -- especially if the other team is from the ACC, and they've made Kentucky an honorary ACC team. To give me time to cool off, I didn't really watch the first 38 minutes of the KU-UK game. Not unusual -- I "watched" the KU-Syracuse '03 title game mostly during commericals of the Stargate SG-1 reruns on Sci-Fi. Given the series history, I was expecting a blowout, plus, I really expected a better Minnesota-Green Bay game, so I spent a lot of time on Fox.

I don't think I missed all that much, it was a horrible game -- bad execution, terrible free throw shooting, and no offensive flow on either side, except for the cameras constantly panning to Ashley Judd (good choice, even if she is a Wildcat fan). But I watched (most) of the last two minutes -- because we won. Well, not quite. At that point I would have stayed anyway.

So I don't have any brilliant analysis of the game, how the Jayhawks gutted out a win on the road without Simeon, or the play of Moody, or how irritating Bill Packer really is. All I know is, we won. Like a Red Sox fan, I hope this reverses the curse, and we'll spend the next century beating the pants off of Kentucky.

Anyway, it's a start.