The Final Four of the NCAA Tournament was determined this past weekend with North Carolina State, Purdue, UConn and Alabama earning the right to play on the final few days of the college basketball season. As I let my windshield wipers struggle to fling the latest deposit of wet spring snow off into the mud, I glanced at my phone and saw a short video. Making the rounds was the clip of the Wolfpack (NC State) hitting a last-second three-pointer in the semifinals of the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) Tournament to force overtime against Virginia. A game they would go on to win and then ultimately punch their ticket to the NCAA Tournament by winning the tournament championship and getting the automatic bid. They were not considered a tournament team before that run. Now they are in the Final Four for the first time since winning it all in 1983, arguably the most improbably championship run in college basketball history.
It got me thinking.
About mental health. And endurance. And circumstances we as people face and why sports can be a great beacon for us in a lot of different ways.
That team didn’t give up. They still haven’t. They felt like they still had their best play in them, even on the brink of their season coming to an end. I think a lot of us feel this way. Even as we trudge through another winter and sloppy transition into spring with challenges blowing in our face we still believe there’s a lot of good results out there waiting for us if we just keep at it. So, I hope you’ll keep getting up, putting one foot in front of the other and push through the fog. The Big Dance just might be there for you.
Even more poignant, the coach of that 1983 team, Jim Valvano, has famously been immortalized with his battle against cancer a few years later and his phrase “Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up.”
Don’t give up folks. Somebody loves you.
• Odds and Ends
Here are a few things on my mind as the Sports Journal gives me a chance to opine on a several different topics.
– I think it’s incredibly disingenuous of NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell, to pretend to champion player safety with rule changes like the hip-drop tackle while simultaneously announcing the league is going to play two games on Christmas Day, a Wednesday.
Telling me flagging certain natural movements in the game and pretending that adding games and shortening the recovery time is fine, is a load of manure. A big, heaping pile of it.
– I feel bad for the fans and students of Utah State Basketball. All they’ve done is create and sustain one of the really incredible places for the college game, and they are now searching for their fourth coach in five years. At one point does one of these guys decide that getting canned a few years from now may not be worth that big salary bump? Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. I certainly don’t financially. But being in a great place trumps being ultra rich and feeling the highest of pressures. To me at least.
– I think the Wyoming Cowgirls are going to have a great chance to win the Mountain West next season. They were in the hunt for much of this season but faded a bit down the stretch and for the past couple seasons haven’t been able to solve UNLV. But they return a ton of talent and ability next year and this deep run in the WNIT should only pay dividends as the team is playing their best ball when most teams have already cleaned out their locker rooms for the offseason.
