A REFLECTION ON BIG TEN BASKETBALL
Last night I was awake, drinking some wine and watching Penn State play the University of Washington in a Big Ten basketball game.
In the 1890s, these were the kinds of sporting contests reserved for weeklong voyages that likely involved the largesse of George Pullman and James J. Hill, as well as breathless accounts of co-eds waiting on the train platform to bid the Lions of Nittany farewell as they traveled across the wilds of the the American interior to play the cagers
of H. R. Pufenstuf in Sea Attle. It might’ve been quicker to take the train to New York and sail around Cape Horn to what I’m fairly confident was still a Russian colony. Or disputed territory with Canada.
Anyway no, we will not be addressing how Northwestern allowed a 40-15 run to Michigan over the last approximately 10 minutes of a basket ball contest to lose by double-digits in a game they led by double-digits.
Penn State-Washington is a war crime.
I say “is”, because I still feel personally terrorized by it, and to give you a sense of scale, three days ago a man was abducted by masked agents not four blocks from my house. They left his groceries in the backseat and his soccer cleats in the trunk, told one of my neighbors to “go back into your house and bake some cookies” and shook a canister of pepper spray not a foot from the face of another one of my neighbors.
I live in a suburb some six miles outside the downtown core of Minneapolis.
SBNation: The Year of Conversations!
There is literally one-tenth of a second left in Penn State-Washington, and as I type this, the referees are reviewing a play in which two Washington players are on the ground and a third is falling down. None of them are running that “get on all fours and bark like a dog” play that you ran in third grade. It is 63-60, Penn State. What they are reviewing I do not know, because there will be six-tenths of a second left on the clock and unless Washington has a player who can volleyball-set the basketball from behind the three-point line, they will not win this game.
(They did not win this game. But I’m going to pursue this idea of “volleyball players who can spot-set a ball into the net from a great distance,” because I feel like it’s a game-changer. Feels like within a couple months Danny Darko Dorian Dusty May will have recruited the nation’s top men’s volleyball setter to Michigan basketball on a $2 million NIL deal.)
Tough break for Terry Steinbach and the New Ulm Eagles.
Or whomever.
