Reflections on Big Ten Basketball
Last night I was awake, had some wine, and watched a Big Ten basketball game between Penn State and Washington.
In the 1890s, these athletic contests were held for week-long voyages, likely involving the generosity of George Pullman and James J. Hill, and breathless depictions of schoolgirls and boys waiting on train stations to bid farewell to the Nittany Lions as they traveled across the wilds of the American interior to compete in H.R. Pufenstuf’s cage match in “Sea Attle.” It would probably be faster to take a train to New York and then sail around Cape Horn to what I’m fairly confident is still a Russian colony. or territory disputed with Canada.
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Regardless, we won’t discuss how Northwestern allowed Michigan to go on a 40-15 run in the final 10 minutes or so of a basketball game only to lose by double digits in a game they led by double digits.
Penn State Washington is a war crime.
I say “yes” because I personally am still scared, and to give you a sense of scale, three days ago a man was kidnapped by masked agents less than four blocks from my home. They left his groceries in the back seat, left his soccer cleats in the trunk, told one of my neighbors to “go back to your house and bake some cookies,” and shook a can of pepper spray less than a foot from my other neighbor’s face.
I live in a suburb about six miles outside of downtown Minneapolis.
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SBNation: The year of dialogue!
Penn State-Washington actually has a tenth of a second left, and as I type this, the referees are reviewing a play in which two Washington players were down and a third player was down. None of them ran the “get on all fours and bark like a dog” game like they did in third grade. It’s now 63-60, Penn State. I don’t know what they’re commenting on because there’s six-tenths of a second left on the clock and unless Washington has a player who can line up the ball behind the three-point line, they’re not going to win this game.
(They didn’t win this game. But I’m going to pursue the idea of “volleyball players being able to spot the ball into the net from great distances” because I feel like that’s a game changer. It feels like in a few months Danny Darko Dorian Dusty May will add the nation’s top men’s volleyball setter to Michigan basketball in a $2 million deal. )
Tristan Bach and the New Ulm Eagles had a rough break.
Or whoever it is.