We’ll go a little long this week as I attempt to clean out the queue a bit after missing a week.
“The Lightning I/II” – Arcade Fire Damn, I really should have included these two weeks ago when they first came out, but I forgot to drop them into my working list for the Friday PLs. The good thing is in the two weeks since, I’m move convinced these are great and a sign that those of us that loved early Arcade Fire but not so much their more recent stuff are going to dig their next album. This thing cooks!
“Anything But Me” – MUNA I first heard of this trio last fall via their collaboration with Phoebe Bridgers, “Silk Chiffon.” This is a pretty great second effort. It strikes me as what HAIM would sound like if they went a little more electro-pop. I love the opening lines:
You’re gonna say that I’m on a high horse I think that my horse is regular-sized Did you ever think, maybe, you’re on a pony Going in circles on a carousel ride?
“Dangerous” – The Mysterines This does not sound like a British band at all. They sound way too tough and have too much of a bluesy edge to them. I would have said Detroit. Maybe Jersey City. Joke’s on me; they’re from Liverpool. LIVERPOOL!!! I don’t care where they’re from, this song is badass.
“Rock Bottom” – Kevin Morby Morby is at his best when making uptempo rockers like this.
“Victory Dance” – My Morning Jacket Monday afternoon I was waiting in the school lot to get L. Normally I am flipping around Sirius stations while I wait. To deal with my pregame stress I was shuffling through my Spotify catalog. At about 2:45 this started playing. I knew it was an omen. Turned out that was right! I’ve listened to it at least 10 times since.
“Convoy” – C.W. McCallWilliam Dale Fries Jr. passed away on April 1 at the age of 93. After a successful career in advertising he rode the CB radio fad of the 1970s into one of the most unlikely number one songs in the history of the pop charts. I LOVED this song when I was four years old. I’m pretty sure I had some “act” I did when it came on the radio that delighted my grandparents. Different times. RIP.
You might have heard that the Kansas Jayhawks won the NCAA men’s basketball championship on Monday. I didn’t want to let the occasion pass without sharing some, well a lot, of thoughts. These should be super disjointed as they were assembled in various moments and in different stages of sobriety.
I will the answer the question I got from several people first: no, I did not turn the game off. Come on, this was KU basketball in the national title game. I might go through a few stages of my sports pouting, but I wasn’t turning it off. Not until the cause was hopeless, at least.
What I did do, though, was mute the entire halftime show and listen to music while I sat and stewed. I also started banging out some thoughts for my sad, post-loss blog entry. I wrote about how the lack of an athletic big finally caught up with KU. How KU was cursed in the Superdome (this would make them 0–3 in title games there, plus another national semifinal loss). And how despite the bracket breaking their way, they still ran into one of the best “on a hot streak” teams in tournament history.
Here’s the thing, though As frustrated as I was at halftime, with KU down 15 and thinking that was too big a deficit to make up, I wasn’t totally without hope. Carolina hit a bunch of tough-ass shots in the first half and cashed-in 11 free throws. It’s not like they were playing lights out. They were just getting rebounds and getting fouled. Meanwhile KU was missing a ton of shots right at the rim. It wasn’t too tough to see Carolina starting to miss the ones they had made, and KU making the ones they had missed.
But, still, 15 points is a lot. You figure Carolina can play kind of crap and still hold on to win.
I did though, and this is key, change seats.
Just as I did when KU trailed Kansas State by 16 at halftime in January, I moved from the couch to the chair next to it. And I cracked open a beer. You all laugh at me, but didn’t KU play better from the opening seconds of the second half? Prove to me that I didn’t play some, even tiny, cosmic role in that. YOU CAN’T, CAN YOU????
In a game like this it’s tough to pick a key, or even favorite, play. Was it the DaJuan Harris to David McCormack lob on the first possession of the second half, that set the tone for what was to come? Christian Braun causing havoc and running it down the Tar Heel’s throats? Jalen Wilson’s and-one that put KU up six? DaJuan’s sick floater he kissed off the backboard as he was flying away from the basket? Remy Martin’s RIDICULOUS step-back three with about 3:00 left?[1]
I really hope this shot doesn’t get lost in the chaos of that 2nd half.
Remy is 6’0” on a good day. He hits this over Bacot who’s 6’10”
Those were all great. But I think the most memorable shots have to be McCormack’s two shots in the final 75 seconds. Actually three, since the first of his made baskets in that sequence came after grabbing his own miss and throwing it in over two defenders. The second was calm, cool, and a dagger. It was the more aesthetically pleasing, as well. He looked so confident on it, pumping his fist after like it was something he did every game.
One of my brothers in Jayhawkdom, E$, asked an interesting question three weeks ago, when the tournament began: Had there been a worse player to ever start for KU than McCormack. I think this was a little harsh, as Dave was clearly struggling physically in the Big 12 tournament.
But Dave had always tantalized and teased and flummoxed. He would do things no other big man in the country could do. Then he would miss five straight baskets. Or clank a dunk off the back of the rim. Or lose rebounds without being pressured. Or dribble the ball off his foot. Or have games where he played 20+ minutes and barely made an impact on the boxscore. And so on. He got yanked from the starting lineup as a senior!
He had a lot of talent, but also some physical limitations that seemed like they would prevent him from ever being a great player.
He also played with the curse of coming after the most dominant big man of the Bill Self era, Udoka Azubuike. Dok had his own issues, mostly with injuries and free throws, but he dunked everything, seemed to know his limits, and never got stripped by a guard buzzing through the lane.
This year I came to accept Dave for what he was, and be thankful for the positive moments.
But dude put it all together the last three games of his career. KU fans kept waiting for Ochai Agbaji to take over. But maybe Dave was the senior we should have been focusing on. Dave played the four or five best games of his career over the last month: the regular season finale against Texas, the Big 12 title game against Texas Tech, the Elite 8 game against Miami, and then the Final Four games. Hitting the two shots that won KU the championship turned him into a legend, and fans that he drove crazy for four years will laugh about the ways he frustrated them if they speak of them at all.
Speaking of Ochai, I was getting all kinds of bad vibes as he kept clanking free throws Monday. It felt like Nick Collison in 2003, a guy who was playing his ass off, but then kept missing freebies. In the same damn building. Seemed like bad voodoo, and in the wrong city to have bad voodoo.
Och didn’t have a great game. I don’t think he should have won the MOP. But somewhat lost in the postgame analysis was how he absolutely shut down Caleb Love, who had been the engine for UNC’s March run. Love scored 13 points on 24 shots. TWENTY FOUR SHOTS!!!! That wasn’t all Ochai, as KU switched a lot. But it was mostly Ochai.
Ochai was also responsible for the most powerful postgame moment, when he raced over to his family and greeted them. He burst into tears and hugged his mother and sister as his father screamed, “YOU’RE A CHAMPION, BOY!!!” over and over. We don’t often see that side of players, when they get a chance to celebrate with their families and all the emotions that went into getting to that moment come out.
Remy fucking Martin, man. What a wild ride that was. He gave it all to us in the title game. An awful first half that featured forced shots and getting lost on defense. A second half that included three clutch 3-pointers, a sweet driving layup, and a potentially game-saving block. Fourteen points, a title, and redemption for a regular season that never met expectations.
This was a massive win for Bill Self, in so many ways.
It makes him the most successful coach in KU history.
Two national titles is a big fucking deal. With K retired – thank God! – Self joins Jay Wright and Rick Pitino as active coaches with multiple titles.
The win balances out some of those bad March losses in his tenure at KU. At a minimum, his post-coaching biography will say “two time national champion” before any mention of those unmentionable games.
I think it also mitigates, in some ways, the effects of the looming NCAA penalties. Not that I want to get into that now.
Most of all, the win proves what a great coach he is. I can name at least six, and more likely 7–8, of his teams that were better than this one. Or at least more talented.
Two players on this team were top 50 recruits. Three of the starters were all ranked below 100 in their senior classes. One of his prime bench players was ranked in the 80s, the other well below 100. There wasn’t an Andrew Wiggins or Josh Jackson on the team. Hell, there wasn’t a Wayne Selden or Kelly Oubre. Honestly, this was one of the least talented teams of his 19 years at Kansas.
They guys he had, though, are the ones who hang around for three or four years and understand how to play together. How to not panic when things go sideways. Even the two sophomores, Wilson and Harris, had redshirt years because of injuries and academics, thus a year of at least absorbing how Self wants to play and what it takes to win in the Big 12.
Self has turned KU basketball into an absolute machine. Sixteen conference championships. Eleven conference tournament titles. Ten number one seeds. Nine Elite 8’s. Four Final Fours. Plus there’s the big old asterisk of the 2020 team, which was likely one of two or three best teams ever. And now he has two titles.
Like every coach, Bill Self has his March failings. But with two banners to his name he’s legitimately one of the all-time greats.
I found it incredibly odd that Kansas and North Carolina had two serviceable big men between them. Ten years ago the teams would have run waves of bigs at each other. The game has changed and the talent is spread a lot more widely than it used to be.
I don’t know what’s more ridiculous: a 16–0 run in the national title game, or that same team losing because they were on the wrong side of a 31–10 run.
31–10!!!
Not going to lie, I just about died when DaJuan Harris stepped on the sideline as KU was inbounding with 4-ish seconds left. Same fucking building as Freddy Brown and Chris Webber. SAME FUCKING OPPONENT!!! First the free throws and now this??? I was legit freaking out.
My Carolina friend wished me congrats before the play, and I told him to hang on to see if we got the ball in play. KU had struggled against pressure all year. KU ran the PERFECT play, only for DaJuan to step OB. Sheesh.
Thankfully it didn’t end up making a difference. I’m thrilled the game did not go to OT. Both teams faced foul trouble, have short benches, and Carolina players were dropping like flies. We did not need to see KJ Adams and whoever his UNC equivalent is battling it out for the national title.
Christian Braun played PERFECT defense on Caleb Love on the game’s final shot.
Bill Self warned us that this was coming three weeks ago. During the Big 12 tournament, he said that this is not his best team, but they think that they are. I had not heard that from him all year, and found it fascinating. This team did play with a swagger that seems a little above their heads, but I never really noticed it until a month ago. I heard the Lawrence Journal-World’s Matt Tait on a podcast last week say that Jalen Wilson believes he’s a lottery pick, even though he’s not. I mean, the kid is 6’8” and can’t dunk, but he thinks he is the best player on the court. I LOVE irrationally confident players like that. They can drive you crazy, but when everything comes together, they do amazing things.
This team had all kinds of limitations. But both individually and as a unit, they ignored those barriers. They just went out and balled and expected to win. They didn’t get rattled when they gave up 16 straight points in the title game. They knew if they just tightened some things up, played a little D, and stopped missing layups, they’d be fine.
Which seems insane if you watch them. They are a bunch of nice players, with one who can be all-world when he’s hitting shots. But this team? This is the one that wins Bill Self his second title??? That just seems stupid. It should have been the 2010 team, which was arguably as good as the 2008 squad. Or the 2011 team, that had the entire bracket wide open for them and lost to a shitty team. Or the 2017 team that was a nearly perfect combination of talent.
I mentioned in my Tuesday post that I lost my mind a little during the comeback and in the game’s closing minutes. C was the only other person in the house that was awake at the time. She was in the kitchen to get a snack sometime late in the game, and was there when I ran upstairs to wake L up (more on that in a second). She waved and gave me a big thumbs up and said “DUBS!!” Later she told me she was following the game on her phone. She would hear me scream in the basement and then her app would update the score a few seconds later. She doesn’t know much about hoops but seemed to enjoy this little moment that was all hers.
L told me before she went to bed that she wanted me to wake her if KU won. When TBS went to its first commercial after the final horn, I raced up to her room, opened the door, and shook her. But she was dead to the world. She grunted a couple times and rolled over to get away from me. Tuesday morning she said she had no memory of that.
Speaking of TBS, Bill Raftery is the only person on the broadcast team worth a shit. He gets a little schticky at times, but it’s a good schtick. And I think at times he’s too interested in bantering with his partners. But despite being like 97 years old (or 78) he sees things right away. He notices when teams go away from something they’ve been doing all game. He’ll call out a defensive miscue or someone who makes an adjustment that blows up a play. There were like five times in the second half where he called something out before it happened. Sometimes it takes me three possessions to notice a team has switched to zone, and that’s sitting on my ass in front of a big TV that shows the entire court.
Meanwhile Jim Nantz is giving fouls to the wrong player, trying to turn everything into a pun, and generally making it obvious he’s more interested in getting to Augusta, GA than the game in front of him. I’ve already discussed Grant Hill; no need to pile on.
I posed the question to KU friends, how much national champions gear is too much? I’ve made three orders so far, two for me from different companies and one for the girls. I think it’s weird that national champs gear is produced in limited runs, at least from national companies. Some shirts were already sold out in most sizes by Wednesday morning. Seems like you take as many orders as you can and work to fill them. I’m sure in Lawrence/KC you’ll be able to get things in most sizes for months.
I should get to some ending summary, for any of you who were patient enough to get this far.
I did not see this coming. KU was a number one seed only because of its schedule and winning the Big 12. I would have been ok with a Sweet 16, thrilled with an Elite 8. But as those great KU teams that came up short proved, you don’t have to be the best, most complete team in the country to win the title. You just have to beat the six teams you face. Do that and your warts get forgotten and you become legendary, with your team represented in the rafters for all time.
Championship teams always carve out some identity that defines their legacy. I’m still struggling to figure out what this team’s is. There were two big comebacks in the tournament, but they also jumped all over Villanova early. It’s not like they shot lights-out from 3, or were 1983 Houston/Lousiville, dunking on everyone.
I guess what I’ll remember about this team is their toughness. They refused to wilt. Which, in a lot of ways, makes them the perfect Bill Self team. He harps on not being soft. The 2021–22 Kansas Jayhawks had plenty of soft moments over the first four months of the season. But after the calendar flipped to March, there wasn’t a tougher team in the country.
To close, some of my favorite Tweets of the past few days:
Christian Braun just looked me straight in the eye and called me a bitch
Kansas became the first team in the Kenpom Era (2002-present) to win the national championship while finishing the season with the toughest adjusted strength of schedule.
That was the ballsiest shot in KU history since Ron Kellogg’s baseline jumper to beat Oklahoma in the 1984 Big 8 tournament championship game. And Remy’s had a lot more sauce to it. ↩
Fewer entries this month as college basketball and spring break sucked up a lot of my time.
Shows and Movies
Don’t Look Up
Reviews for this were so mixed, with some people loving it and others straight-up hating it. I was finally encouraged to watch by two different friends who told me they really enjoyed it.
It’s certainly not high cinema, and there is nothing subtle about it. But overall I think it was well done, and we, honestly, aren’t too many steps away from it actually happening. Applied to other situations, of course. I did enjoy the nod to the terrific end-of-the-world The Last Policeman series, which I loved, in the final scene.
A-
Mountain of Storms: A Legendary Road Trip
An old school travel movie covering the 1968 ascent of Cerro Fitz Roy in Argentina by a group that included the founder of the Patagonia gear company.
A
Occupied, season one
This popped up on a list of shows that were suddenly topical after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is a Norwegian series about a “soft” invasion of their country by the Russians after Norway attempts to shut off its oil production and shift to clean energy. There is some Scandinavian weirdness to it – there are a ton of scenes where two characters say “Hello,” to each other and then share an awkward pause before starting their actual conversation – and the story is a little nutty. There are more seasons but I think one was enough for me.
B
Killing Eve, season one
I’ve heard great things about this for years and finally took a crack at it. As with Barry, I was completely blown away. What a terrific show in every aspect. Fantastic writing. Amazing acting. Jodie Comer in particular was completely mesmerizing. A near-perfect last episode. I see that the reviews slip in succeeding seasons, so I’m debating whether to continue.
A+
Shorts
Audi E-Tron GT vs. the RS 6 on ice
I’ve heard about these winter driving experience courses. I was hoping to see more wiping out and sliding around. Missing that, still cool to see another way that EVs are better (and cooler) than gas-powered vehicles.
B+
The Wreck of Shackleton’s Endurance
117 years after it sank, researchers found The Endurance, the ship that carried Ernest Shackleton’s legendary polar expedition.
The U.S. Rangers at Pointe du Hoc | History Traveler Episode 53
A YouTube algorithm rec. What amazes me about these types of videos is how much damage the bombings before/during D-Day did to the earth. Massive shell craters remain even after nearly 80 years of wind, rain, and other weather. This has a cheesy musical interlude in the middle and gets a little judgey of a young girl who wasn’t super interested in the site at the end, so I knock it down a notch.
What Intercepted Russian Radio Chatter Reveals
I have taken every piece of evidence of how the war in Ukraine is going with a heavy grain of salt. But this is a fascinating peek into how the Russians are communicating.
So many mood swings. So much frustration at halftime. So much yelling in the second half. So much happiness when that last North Carolina shot grazed the front of the rim and fell short.
I honestly don’t know how my family didn’t come check on me after I nearly blew the roof off our house yelling during that sequence, with about ten minutes left, when Remy Martin hit a corner three to give KU it’s first lead of the second half, DaJuan Harris forced a turnover, and then Jalen Wilson converted an and-one to put KU up six. That might be the loudest I’ve ever yelled for any sports moment in my life.
Then there were ten more crazy minutes after that. Mercy.
And DAVID FUCKING MCCORMACK hit the two biggest baskets of the season and led KU to a national title! A month ago I would have likely picked him last of KU’s top six players to be responsible for making the game winning plays. But that dude, THAT DUDE, has played his ass off for the past month and made up for every single moment of frustration he caused over the past four years. He became a legend, and he should have been the Final Four MOP.
I’m a bit of a mess this morning, as you can imagine. It’s going to take awhile to get more thoughts organized and presented to you.
Events have lined up so that it makes the most sense to combine what should have been two posts into one today. I’ll try to be as brief as I can to both get it out and make it readable.
Spring Break ’22
Spring Break in Siesta Key, FL was largely a success. The weather was mostly good-to-great. We had the pleasure of spending time with a few sets of good friends. The girls all had friends close by for at least parts of the week. Our location was ideal – a block from the Village, Siesta Key’s central dining and shopping area – and our house served its purpose.
M brought one of her best friends with us and she stayed through Thursday. They had a couple good friends on the island and we rarely saw them other than when they came home at night and before they left in the morning.
C didn’t have any friends close, but one of her besties was up on Anna Maria, and she came down for a day, then C went up and spent the next day with her.
L had a few friends about that she kind of drifted in-and-out with throughout the week.
L’s godparents were staying not too far from us, and we spent three days with them on the beach. Two of their adult kids drifted in-and-out for parts of the week.
Our old neighbors – who we have traveled to Hawaii, Mexico, and Captiva with – flew into Ft Myers Wednesday and came up to spend Thursday with us.
There were also about a million Indianapolis Catholics on the island, so we were constantly running into people we knew.
Ahhh, I mentioned a few rough spots.
The winds were outrageous Wednesday and Thursday, while Friday morning was rainy. We still got decent beach time in each of those days.
When we arrived last Saturday the line for rental cars was massive. I stood in it for about 20 minutes when a guy came over and told us he had been in line for four hours and while he had been checked through, he was still waiting for them to give him his keys. He claimed there were two people working the desk and had to run back-and-forth to the lot to grab keys as cars were turned in and cleaned.
Who knows if that part was true, but the four-hour wait looked legit. Since we just had a reservation but had not paid, we decided to bail and get an Uber to our house. Two problems: we had M’s friend, which put us at six people and we couldn’t find a ride that would take six plus luggage. Second, only S had the Uber app on her phone and the network was fried, so my download was going to take hours.
We reserved the biggest car we could find, then asked that driver if he could hook us up with a second.
“I can call my brother! Is that ok with you!”
That was indeed ok! Especially if he let us pay cash.
Turns out they were two brothers from Colombia and thoroughly delightful. They got us where we needed to be and I had a great conversation with Mauricio over the half hour trip.
Monday I Ubered back and waited less than five minutes to grab a minivan for the rest of the week. If we didn’t have to take C to Anna Maria and bring M’s friend back to the airport, we could have skipped it. But it was nice to have.
That was minor compared to our issues getting home.
You may have heard Southwest had some issues this weekend (and may still be struggling). We got to the airport early for our 1:35 PM flight. Grabbed some seats near our gate. And sat and watched as we heard rumors that Southwest flights were having issues getting out while also watching the radar that looked completely awful just to our north. Soon the entire airport was on a ground hold because of that weather.
But our plane had made it in from St. Louis, and we watched a fresh crew walk onto it. Once the airport reopened, we would be good.
Or so we thought.
We waited for four hours before our flight was cancelled. Along with every other Southwest flight that had been sitting around. Sarasota is not a huge airport, but there were at least five completely full flights that just got taken off the schedule. Ticket counters had lines hours long. We heard there were also massive waits for help on the Southwest phone line.
As we sat around and tried to figure out what to do one of L’s friend’s moms texted me. “Mallory told me your flight got cancelled,” the text read. “We have a big SUV and I think we have room for all five of you. Do you want to ride with us?”
Yes, we did want to ride with them!
They were down in Ft. Myers, so it took some back-and-forth to figure out a plan, but they arrived about 90 minutes later, we piled all our shit in, and headed north.
We’ve made the spring break drive home from Florida at least twice, and know how much it sucks. I have to say, we totally lucked out. We drove through some weather for an hour or so, then some heavy fog for about an hour after that. But otherwise it was clear sailing all the way to Indiana. We had to make a brief detour to avoid a big slowdown near Seymour, but otherwise never wavered from our course or hit any stop-and-go traffic at all. It seemed like any other Saturday night, not one when a quarter of the country is making the same trip.
With three adult drivers we just passed off to each other and never stopped for longer than it took for eight people to use the bathroom, fill up with gas, and grab some snacks. We rolled into our driveway exactly 15 hours after we left Sarasota, which is pretty great time!
We heard lots of other people were driving back Sunday and traffic was its usual, awful spring break self. We are super thankful that our friends ignored the texts they were getting from other people looking for a ride and reached out to us, and that our drive home was uneventful.
So that was spring break 2022. Siesta Key certainly felt more traditionally “spring break” than anywhere we’ve ever gone before, between its packs of kids roaming around, more open drinking, and less stringent rules. Anna Maria, where we stayed last year, is getting more crowded, but still has a strict 10:00 PM noise curfew and more families with small kids than high school and college kids running around.[1] We would have loved to take our house from last year and plop it down on Siesta Key.
Jayhawk Talk: Marble Time
For the tenth time in history, and sixth time in my life, the Kansas Jayhawks will play for a national championship tonight.
I have vivd memories of most of those days, mostly of being unable to concentrate at school or work, or that I had a stomach bug in 2008 and watched KU win while in pain and with my head on a pillow.
I wonder how I will remember today years from now, or if being nearly 51 means the game will be imprinted into my brain much differently than the previous five.
I would love to set up tonight’s game with a recounting of KU’s cathartic win over Villanova in Saturday’s national semifinal.
However, as part of our travel issues Saturday, I didn’t see a minute of that game live. The Sarasota airport is tiny, and has only one restaurant/bar outside security. And that place was not seating anyone because they were closing.
Down in the baggage area, where we waited for about two hours after our flight was cancelled, there were no TVs at all. And because there were thousands of people flooding the cell network, I couldn’t get any sports site to load to even do a simple game cast, let alone watch CBS video of the game. I chatted with or waved to a handful of other very nervous Jayhawks looking for a way to follow the game.
So I relied on friends texting me at every TV timeout with score updates. I have to say, that’s a pretty stress-free way to follow a game! Especially when your team jumps out to a 10–0 lead and never looks back.
Our ride arrived with about 6:00 left in the game, just as Villanova cut the KU lead to six. We made a quick stop at Chick-Fil-A then I was given the first driving shift. While I ate my dinner. In a driving rainstorm. Fortunately we had a couple long red lights before we hit I–75 and I knew KU that had basically closed out the game before we got on the road.
It was the most anti-climactic Final Four game of my life. Well, I guess Villanova blowing us out four years ago was pretty anticlimactic, too. But this time I wasn’t feeling the full, pure joy I would be feeling had I watched live. I couldn’t really celebrate until we stopped in Valdosta, GA and I was able to catch up on texts and Tweets.
I did watch the game after we got home. What a performance! Ochai Agbaji found it again. David McCormack played the best game of his career. KU was fantastic on defense. DaJuan Harris and Christian Braun both hit some huge and timely shots. Jalen Wilson continued to destroy people on the boards. It may have been a reduced Villanova team, but they are still a bitch to play against and never stopped playing hard even when down 19. If KU had slipped up, they were fully capable of winning.
So much to be excited about after that game. But also so much to worry about, like the odds that Ochai starts 6–6 again, that Dave can play like that against Carolina’s bigs, that DaJuan will drill 3–5 3’s, that Jalen can do his rebounding thing against UNC, that we won’t leave Brady Manek open for 3’s, etc.
Maybe Carolina’s athletes are too much for KU, and having just beaten Duke they play free-and-loose and run the Jayhawks out of the building.
But they also have a first-year coach and just won a massively emotional game. Can do they bounce back and be as focused tonight?
I keep getting vibes off this KU team. The way they act on and off the court. Before, during, and after games. They way they keep picking each other up, with a different set of guys being the stars each night. I love how Bill Self has embraced the moment, saying it’s time for KU to make runs like this and finish them off. I love how the national narrative has become that this year is about finishing what the 2020 team was unable to do thanks to Covid.
I feel like this is their night and this is KU’s year. It’s been 14 years since they grabbed all the marbles. Anthony Davis and company kept KU from doing that again in 2012. I think Ochai, DaJuan, CB, J-Will, Big Dave, Remy, and Mitch get it done tonight, winning one for Jayhawks everywhere, and for Wilt Chamberlain, who came so close against Carolina in 1957.
Rock Chalk, bitches!
The night C stayed up there she said one of her friend’s parents got a $75 fine for having kids out on the balcony after 10. They weren’t drinking or smoking, just hanging out, making a little noise. Along with the fine came a warning that a second offense would mean they get kicked out of their home. They don’t play on AMI. ↩
