Saturday, March 26, 2005
Syracuse Regional
So it'll be Badgers-Tarheels in the regional final at the Carrier Dome tomorrow afternoon. Last night's games were well worth the walk to campus. The Wisconsin-N.C. State game was unfortunately discoherent, the first half favoring the Wolfpack and the second dominated by the Badgers. N.C. State fell apart in the second half; couldn't make a shot, couldn't defend. By the end of the game, the regular, varied dances and waves by the Wisconsin contingent got me thinking that Badger fans are like a cult. I offer this only provisionally and with a quasi-affectionate ambivalence toward Wisconsin sports, of course. They sang through bizarr-o chants and cheers, though--stuff nobody who decided to be a Badger fan for just one day would ever figure out in the two hours of a single game.
And almost everyone walked away from the Villanova-UNC game with the sense that the officials intervened excessively in the last two minutes. At least two calls (the foul shot lane violation and the travel) could have gone either way, and both calls went against Nova for plays that would have favored them. The Tarheels looked like they'd regressed into the lackluster style they showed in the ACC Tournament--lots of talent, but no spark, no sense of urgency, no intensity. So they make great plays to bail themselves out, squeak by. Plus, we were sitting at the border between local Villanova/Big East fans and UNC fans, so there was lots of antagonistic banter reduced to jeering reduced to blathering idiocy. Contributing factor could have been the four pints of JD and Captain Morgan's smuggled by the four hoops fans to my right.
Posted by
dmueller at March 26, 2005 12:58 PM
to Sport