Weekend Notes

Final Four

Well, at least UConn lost.

That’s the only good takeaway from the men’s Final Four for a neutral observer. The championship game was an ugly slog. Michigan was clearly the better team all night, but was missing easy shots, then forced things by taking terrible shots. The teams combined to miss nearly twice as many shots as they made (42 shots made, 81 missed). Sooooo many sloppy turnovers. Wildly inconsistent officiating.[1] And, since it is 2026, we had a totally needless review in the game’s closing seconds. Amazingly the refs wrapped that review up in record time.

Unless you are a Michigan fan, this is not one that you will put in a time capsule. All film should probably be burned.

The rest of the weekend wasn’t much better. I thought UConn-Illinois would be free flowing and full of offense. Illinois was awful most of the night. A late rally at least made that game a little interesting, but it was the classic too little, too late comeback. And then Arizona apparently sent their JV team against UM and were run off the floor from the opening tip.

Not exactly an example of all that is great about the sport.

And now the transfer portal is officially open, meaning about half the players who have eligibility for next year will now “explore their options.” I rolled my eyes at the Way Too Early Top 25’s that rolled out immediately after the game last night. Those are always dumb, but especially now. You have no idea what rosters are going to look like, how can you rank the teams? Gotta crank out that content, though…

The women’s Final Four wasn’t much better, at least on the court. UCLA went from the worst Final Four loss ever last year, to winners in one of the biggest championship game blowouts ever. South Carolina blew out UConn in their semifinal. UCLA-Texas might have been the ugliest game of the weekend.

At least the women had a huge story that had nothing to do with the scores, Geno Auriemma losing his mind in the closing seconds of UConn’s loss Friday night. I trust you’ve all seen it, or read about it, by now so no need to rehash in detail.

It was an outrageous moment that took away from one of the more shocking FF results in recent memory. South Carolina was decent, but far from the best Gamecocks team in recent memory, while UConn was on a 50+ game winning streak and seemed destined to win the title. Yet the game was pretty much over by halftime. And then Geno went coo-coo and took all the attention away from South Carolina’s dominance or anything UCLA did in the late game.

He has apologized, kind of. Maybe. We aren’t really sure what the interaction between him and Dawn Staley has been since Friday night.

I’m totally on Team Staley here. She is awesome. You can dislike some of her methods – true of any coach – but I think she’s an incredible coach who has moved the game forward. I think she genuinely cares about her players – as does Geno – and has built an incredible program in Columbia. If L was anywhere near good enough to play at that level, I would want her to play for Dawn over Geno. Hell, as much as L loves UConn, she was on Team Staley Friday night, too.

Sports needs spicy rivalries, and too many interactions between coaches and programs these days are vanilla. Or are centered on social media. South Carolina and UConn play this coming November. I guarantee that is going to get a lot of media, no matter what else is going on in the sports world that night.

Easter

We had a nice Easter. I forget why, but our family celebration was moved to Saturday, with us hosting. I believe we only had 16 for the meal portion of the day. Continuing a tradition we began last year, we just ordered a bunch of barbecue and had the family add the sides around it. Worked out ok.

Unfortunately for the four little ones, it started pouring just before people arrived at our house. Our girls did their best to hide eggs in our basement, but it was not as interesting as getting to use our entire yard.

M and C were both home for the weekend. With our celebration on Saturday, L got to work her first real shift at the ice cream shop on Sunday. Between it being cooler and a holiday, I didn’t think they would be busy. But she came home with a sore forearm from all her scooping.

C just has four more weeks of classes this semester. M has four weeks left in her spring co-op.

Surprise Proposal

The CHS prom is coming up in a week and L was planning on going with a group of girl friends who all did not have dates.

She spent Saturday night at a friend’s house and was already home when I came downstairs Sunday morning. S laughed and said, “L has something to tell you.” She was holding a piece of poster board and said, “I got prom-posaled.” The kid she dated the first half of sophomore year asked her out. They are still friendly, although it sounds like he may be interested in re-igniting the relationship where she is lukewarm on the matter. He’s been to our house when she’s had friends over and it makes me laugh every time, because in the year since they dated he has grown 5–6 inches and grown his hair out so it looks a little like Prince in 1983. There are going to be a lot of curls in their pictures.

I guess this throws L’s plans into a bit of a lurch, as we rented a limo to transport the girls. Apparently she is on it, and now some boys will come here for pictures but then get to the dance on their own.