Bootlegged highlights

Watch for Never Nervous Pervis midway through the video, chewing gum and calmly applauding while Freedom Hall goes berserk.

Kuric alley oop with a minute to play

Give it to Sosa, he laid it up perfectly for Kuric to slam home.

Post-game interview with Kyle Kuric

See video from the Bozich blog here. The kid definitely is shy, maybe still a little shell-shocked and mystified at how well he played, not yet up to speed with Pitino's version of events (unbeknownst to Kyle, Pitino apparently said he asked to take extra shots before the game which tipped off Pitino of his brilliance to come... an anecdote that Kyle hints isn't necessarily grounded in fact), but shows humility, has a big smile, and even flashes some hints of that unmistakable midwestern charm (disclaimer: I am in love with Kyle Kuric). The feeling here is that he's going to have to get used to those bright lights: this kid is explosive, he's got two more years, and he's going to contribute. Asked if any of the old-timers who congratulated him afterward knew who he was, Kyle responded, "They do now."

Let's go dancin'

I don't even mean that in the tournament-sense, there's time for that later. Today was a celebration of history, of present, and of future. Of what it means to be a fan of the University of Louisville. Watching Jerry Smith ignite our engine in the first half, watching Edgar Sosa hit clutch buckets when the engine almost stalled, watching Reginald Delk again play unsung hero. All seniors, all played proud.

But the day was championed by Kyle Kuric. I'm positive that no where on Jim Boheim's scouting report did the words, "We must shut down Kuric" appear. But that's what is amazing about the sport. Kuric isn't just a stereotypical white-boy jump shooter. In addition to doing everything today except for turning off the lights when he left, he connected on some dunks that surely did all his hi-flying forefathers in attendance proud.

Kuric led the way, but today was for the Cardinals. Much, much more later. But the sun is shining in Louisville. Let's go paint the town Red.

Cards take down #1 Syracuse in last game at Freedom Hall

The most memorable game was the last. Pitino donned the red sport jacket that we always knew was in his closet. Griffith, Pervis, DeJuan, Bridgeman and Crum among others helped excite the crowd throughout the game. Jerry kept us close early before injuring his thumb. Sosa played a good overall game, while Siva keyed an important second half run. And Kyle Kuric put on one of the most incredible, athletic, and clutch, game-saving performances I have ever seen (having so many of the Doctors of Dunk in attendance must have inspired at least a few of those soaring dunks and alley oops). Three-pointers, rebounds, steals, slams... the kid did it all, a legendary game from the sophomore from Evansville. Led by Kuric, Swop, Samuels, and Sosa -- led really by everybody who played in the second half, I thought -- the Cards slayed Goliath a second time and earned their NCAA tourney bid. The victory ends our history in the Hall ever appropriately, with a game we will remember for years to come. Go Cards, and goodbye Freedom Hall. I'm going to miss that old building, capable of college basketball thrills and magic down to its very last day...

Of awllllll time!!!

My favorite Freedom Hall memory isn't even a basketball moment. It was two seasons ago when Muhammad Ali made a surprise appearance and was introduced to the crowd during an extended TV timeout. After roundly applauding, as the game resumed I yanked Ms. Red by the arm, scrambled out of our seats, and we skirted down the concourse to try and get a close up view as he exited. He was nowhere to be seen at first, and we were about to return to our seats when she said quietly..."There he is!"

There he was. Walking slowly through the hallway like any other schmuck, except he still had that legendary aura that separates him from all us schmucks. He had an entourage of only a few, and some stragglers returning from the restroom stopped in their tracks and stared. A few were snapping photos with camera phones. I took a deep breath, walked up quickly, looked him in the eye, and touched his shoulder.

Afterwards, Ms. Red commented, "Hey Creep Show, he's not a statue, ya know?" Perhaps, but in my book there's a vast difference between being able to say, "I once saw The Greatest" and "I once touched The Greatest on the shoulder".

By the way, like most sports bloggers, I'm an avid reader of Bill Simmons, who essentially invented our genre. But he made one of the dumbest points ever in a recent chat by claiming that the trials Tiger Woods is now facing outweigh those Ali faced during his comeback from boxing-exile. At first he seemed to realize the foolishness of the sentiment, but then decided to double down and defend the point in an extended column. While many things in sports irk me, nothing really gets under my skin except for John Calipari and people misrepresenting Muhammad Ali. So, I thoroughly enjoyed it when ESPN rival Rick Reilly owned Simmons in a recent podcast on the issue. My apologies to those of you that don't care a wit about sportswriter one-up-manship.

Here's a couple other ESPN luminaries sharing their favorite memories of Freedom Hall. You'll know them both, of that I'm sure.

****UPDATE****
Whoa!!! This whole thing has been stepped up a notch in the last hour! Former ESPN caster and current poltical-something Keith Olbermann lambasted Bill Simmons on the same point today, in this post. Simmons, master of the new media, responded via twitter:

KO, please know the feeling is mutual. You're my worst case scenario for my career in 12 yrs: a pious, unlikable blowhard who lives alone.
P.S. I feel bad about saying Olbermann lives alone. I forgot about his cats.

Sportswriters gone wild! For the record, as much as I admire Bill and agree that Olbermann is a blowhard, he sounds like an adolescent by immediately bring up personal details in a professional disagreement, blabbing gossip to his legions about Olbermann's life. He's losing points with me by the minute.

I have a dream!

I dreamt last night that UofL made the tournament as a 7 seed, announced in the final region after everyone was starting to sweat. But I also dreamt I witnessed some Bigfoot/Mothman creature in my back yard and chased him through a hotel, so take that for what it's worth.

Sunshiny Day

Good Friday morning Cards fans. Sorry to have been absent the past few days following Louisville's embarrassing and halting "performance" against Marquette, but my counterpart covered the trainwreck ably, and anyway I've been busy... just this morning, I talked down a still depressed Mr. Red from a high ledge.

Lest we succumb to total somberness, I feel obliged to remind you (or just myself) of all the exciting things happening at the moment. Even before seeing the CJ's article on it this morning, I was in the neighborhood and felt curious enough to drive by the downtown arena site this a.m. to see with my own eyes how our future chambers our taking shape. It was the first time I've witnessed the arena beginning to look like the eventual palace it will become for our men's and women's basketball teams, and I can't wait for it to open (how I'll score tickets on a semi-regular basis is, of course, another matter).

On the drive home, Charlie Strong's giant smiling mug greeted me from a billboard above the highway. It calmed me as I navigated Spaghetti Junction and gave me the mental zen needed to cut off two others so I had a better view of the Big 4 Bridge walkway construction. When I arrived home, I read how the baseball team's off to a record 8-0 start. Then the missus called to coordinate what time to set out for Freedom Hall's historic last day tomorrow, against no less than the #1 team in the country (on a side note, I was amused by a story told by my uncle, that at the previous home game he saw fans chipping away concrete scraps off the walls to take home as souvenirs... folks, they're not tearing Freedom Hall down; the fairgrounds will still be using it for the next thirty years!).

No matter the outcome, you couldn't write a more fitting end to the basketball glories of the Hall. Nonetheless, this team is such the total frustration of logic and expectations and consistency that it's almost expected -- precisely because there's no reason to -- that the Cards might pull a rabbit out of their hat once more, shock the Orange, secure their tourney bid, and send out the Hall in a final blaze of fiery stubborn glory (and then get blown out in the first round of the Big East tournament). So all in all, it's good to be a Cardinal. We'll see how that temperament fares come Saturday afternoon.

Unreal, ctd. pt VI

I'm not taking last night's loss well, in case you missed the signals. I'm sure the "perspective" police will disagree, but for this fan, last night's whiff didn't feel like just another stumble. It felt like the end of something.

It's not supposed to be like this. The team has talent; our players like each others' company and the whole city likes them back. We have back-against-wall-camaraderie on our side from all the self-righteous snickering ahout our coach's indiscretion. The Cards should be welcoming a role as a tested team that no one wants to face. We should be lapping up platitudes from the national media as the best team no one is talking about.

Except we're not. Not this time. The Pitino-February chemistry we've grown accustomed to hasn't catalyzed. Once significant aspirations for the season have been tamped down to hoping for a dignified farewell to the Hallowed Hall, and checking to see which mid-major team may burst our Bubble.

Of course, I will give full-throated support to this team till the end. I'll continue every March tradition to avoid a jinx, and will be glued to each second of action with knowledge that we can win. But, with honesty, I cannot pretend that this team has the magic. It's a bleak picture, one most won't want to accept, but it is what it is, and unfortunately, it's not unreal. I hope I'm wrong.

Unreal, ctd. pt V

Among the many things plaguing the team last night, the Cards were essentially playing one man down, getting nothing from the power forward position. I am in the minority in that I find Jared Swopshire to be a capable Big East forward, but when he is bad, man is he horrid. Buckles is inexperienced and unpolished, so watching him play 20+ minutes was a shock, and made me wonder why Pitino didn't let him work out the kinks and bring him along earlier.

Buckles is the future at the position. He physically fits the part. But at the moment he's woefully unskilled on offense. Both he and Swop put up some of the worst layups I can recall. They weren't even really layups, since they just chucked the ball hard at the backboard. They were more like throw-ups, and that's what I felt like doing.

Unreal, ctd. pt IV

How loathsomely lame is Marquette? Their coach is a cartoon character, their student section is as edgy as "The Buttercream Gang", their new unis are hideous, and their mascot looks like a diseased vulture. So when we were getting creamed by the buttercreamers of the Big East, yes, it felt very unreal.

Unreal, ctd. pt III

Sosa. There comes a point when even the, love-em, hate-em, love to hate-em, storylines become tired and...I'm even too tired to find another synonym.

Yes, I'm reactionary, yes I sang his praises after UConn, yes Sosa feeds off the hate.

But no one should kid themselves anymore into thinking he is "growing" or "maturing" into a leadership role. He ain't. He's a leader only in the sense that he's one of our more talented players capable of making a big play. He doesn't make his teammates better, and the team is worse for it.

And most galling?  He (and we) have been suffering through this same spiel now for nearly 36 months. So when, in a key possession, with no offense set up, Sosa paused for maybe a half-second before jacking an errant 18-footer, it was all just...unreal.

Unreal, ctd. pt II

Let's keep with the video game theme. What was with our ADD head coach playing lineup roulette? Every 30 seconds, frantically pressing UP-DOWN-LEFT-RIGHT-AB-AB-SELECT-START to try and unlock the secret formula to victory.

And the real shame is, I do believe the right X and O code was there for the taking; Louisville had the roster to create major matchup problems for the Golden Eagles. This game echoed, again, the gripes of oh so many fans during the Pitino years. When the ball is tipped, whatever mood the Louisville team is in that night will determine the outcome. We waived buh-bye to shrewd, in-game adjustments a long time ago.

And what was with that timeout immediately after Sosa nailed a trey to complete a 5-0 run? Was Pitino trying to kill our only momentum of the 2nd half? It was all just...unreal.

Unreal, ctd.

If you had been friends with Samardo when you were little, he would have been the kid you let win a round of Mortal Kombat every once in awhile lest he pout and ruin the afternoon. He's just too sensitive to ever be a dominant player.

He has those great soft hands that allow him to catch every entry pass, but that same softness allows the ball to be swatted out by any diminutive guard. And the more he's frustrated, the more frustrating he gets. That traveling violation he incurred after a nice defensive play, it was all just so...unreal.

Unreal

Paraphrasing the line from "Tin Cup" that the douche, villain ex-boyfriend says to Kevin Costner at the end:  

"I gotta hand it to you. When you go down, you go down in flames."

Except unlike that underrated film, there was nothing remotely admirable about this swing and miss. The Cards went down, and we went down ugly, embarrassingly, unfathomably. I wish there was another way to spin it, but truly there isn't. Most likely, this signals the end of our season.

Not our tournament hopes, per se, though those also hang perilously. But to any hope that this team had a formidable run hidden in them. A loss to Marquette on the road is no shame. But to lose in this fashion, with our key leaders serving as our anchor? At this point in the season, you may as well start playing taps.

SWAT Team

Just humbly to add to Mr. Red's astute observation about my own brilliant point... I did the research, and Louisville has "outblocked" its opponent in 23 of its 29 regular season games. In three games, each team had the same number of blocks, and in only three games has Louisville been outblocked by its opponent. And get this: before Sunday's game against Connecticut, no team had outblocked us head-to-head in Big East conference play. Not Connecticut the first time (8 to 3 Cards), not Villanova (6 to 3 Cards), not Pitt (4 to 3), not West Virginia (5 to 2), not Syracuse (5 to 3). Alas, the UConn Huskies edged us this past weekend, 7 to 6. Among the best individual performances (and this isn't an exhaustive list but what I bothered to write down), Samardo recorded four blocks against UConn and Villanova, TJ had four against South Florida and Depaul, Swop got three against Notre Dame, Samardo another three against East Tennessee State...

So are blocks the hidden cornerstone around which to construct a new, lethal, punishing, brutally effective, law-enforcing SWAT-team defense? Not exactly... according to CBS's web site, Louisville ranks 88th overall in the NCAA (all teams, Division I and otherwise) in blocks per game, at 4.2. Big East teams Connecticut (ranked #3 nationally in BPG), Rutgers (#6), Syracuse (#7), Georgetown, Seton Hall, Pitt, and Providence all outrank us, as do Kentucky, Murray State, Louisiana-Lafayette, Harvard, Yale, and the mighty Spartans of South Carolina Upstate (again, obviously not all Div. I teams facing Div. I competition)... I take that to mean that while we have outblocked opponents in almost every game this season, including most of those higher ranked teams listed above, it hasn't been by a high margin. So I guess you can attribute our game-by-game earnings to shot-blocking threats like Samardo and TJ still coming into their own (and hope they add to their mantle tonight against Marquette). Or maybe we can just chock it up to our competitive spirit. But what might be most appropriate is to turn to divine inspiration from the great Samuel L. Jackson, in the appropriately titled and one of the most remarkable films of our era: [Hondo] You know what they say, you're either SWAT or you're not." Damn straight.

From Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, 6'4'' guard...Jerrrrrrrrrrry Smith!

Perhaps overlooked a little following Edgar Sosa's heroics on Sunday, twin senior Jerry Smith had one of his strongest games this season. He went 4 for 5 from the field, 12 points, 1 assist and 2 steals.

I've worn my heart on my sleave for awhile now, and as much as I try to maintain some quasi-journalistic integrity by acknowledging his struggles, Jerry's my favorite player and has been for 4 years. My dad hails from Wauwatosa, and not only is that a fun word to say, but Jerry brings infectious enthusiasm whenever he laces up the high-tops. You win some, you lose some, but in the long run you end up loving and remembering those players that loved playing for UofL. In that regard, Jerry Smith has more than earned his co-captaincy. It's coming to an end, Jerry, quickly, but hopefully not too quickly. Make each minute count, and may fist pumps fall like rain.

Diener dump

Former Marquette scrapper Travis Diener has been waived by the Indiana Pacers. On the eve of facing the Golden Eagles, this news makes me happy. I don't know why, but God help me, it does.

It's a funny game

The Cards got beat on the boards 50-22. Only six offensive rebounds for the entire team; UConn had two players with 13 boards apiece. Simply unbelievable. Obviously, when the Cards do go dancing, it won't be for very long if that continues. Also, I concur with Mr. Black's observation that blocked shots are becoming a major asset for this team. Samardo, again, came up with a major rejection at the right time. Just glancing at the box score, though, and you'd never suspect the Cards had any business winning.

March

A March without your team playing in the Big Dance is a fate worse than death. I'm not counting my eggs prematurely here, but the Cards are trending upwards, our ticket close to our fingertips. By all indications we won't have to retreat from polite society for the next month.

Most would agree that this has been a season unlike any other. Backs against the wall, suffering the PR embarassment of our coach's indiscretion and heartbreaking losses to archrivals, this team continues to pick itself off the mat, ready to fight another round.

Heck, even I need a breather after yesterday's white-knuckler. But I'm getting inspired by this team's ability to keep getting inspired. It's March, and we can all rest during baseball season. Back into the breach tomorrow, Jerry's going home...