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Not One Shining Moment

It’s a quarter to three on a sunny Tuesday afternoon on the third floor of my university’s School of International Business. (Note to longtime readers: yes, I teach in a business school. Rich kids, mostly. But I’m just here for the language. (English is my personal favourite.) I teach them literacy and love and great songs and joyful reading, yes, and comma faults and five-paragraph essays and there/their/they’re. Some learn.) That means that Monday night’s NCAA final between the Louisville Cardinals and the Michigan Wolverines ended about three hours ago, as we’re a half-day ahead of Eastern Standard Time where I live.

I like this ’13 team better than Chris Webber’s “Fab 5” team, but he was a superb player.

I know that former UM great Chris Webber came to the game, which was a burning question on American sports wires for a day or so. I know that Louisville’s coach, Rick Pitino, had a horse he owns win something big in the equestrian universe. I know that Cardinals star Russ Smith’s high-school coach died recently, and that emerging Wolverine freshman Mitch McGary has a learning disability and, for a while, weight problems that kept him bench-bound.

What I don’t know is who won.

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Forward to the Final Four

When last your confused hoops correspondent waxed prophetic in It’s All About Sports! after the first weekend of American collegiate March Madness, when his bracket was significantly hobbled, he predicted an NCAA Elite 8 as follows.

Some of them really are students, I swear. But this image is disgracefully disingenuous, not that this post really wades into that swamp of “Student Athlete” dismay.

Louisville was to play Duke. Bingo! (Okay, a number one seed against a 2; it hardly ranked with Nostradamus, but I’ll take my successes where I find them.) I picked Duke to win through to tomorrow’s Final Four, because I always do, because: A) they often do, and B) I’m a Blue Devils loyalist. Coach K is great, even if he does do too much commercial shilling, and I always argue that there is a large percentage of available high school recruits that Duke can’t even consider because they genuinely need to be students in Durham. (I hope this is still true.) Louisville was just too relentless, and too quick in the backcourt, for Duke.

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