Minor Blues Pattern

Reading Time: < 1 minute

“Comin’ Home Baby” because it’s EMU’s Homecoming today. The Eagles football team enters the noontime kickoff (underway!) versus Ohio U. on a 15-game losing skid. Something tells me EMU has a good enough chance this homecoming of breaking the minor blues pattern that has become known as “the streak,” a bad luck stretch of albatrossian proportions. For my part, I will not be attending the game; I will remain warmly ensconced in front of my computer, responding to a series of inquiry memos from 326ers and then preparing for the first of two observed class sessions on the calendar in the week ahead.

Reason #7

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Local sports columnist Bud Poliquin shared his “20 Reasons Syracuse Will Make The Sweet 16” in yesterday’s Post-Standard. I’d already picked the Orange to win their first couple of games in this year’s tournament: no surprise, then, that I was nodding along with Poliquin’s twenty reasons.

I paused on No. 7, however:

7.It’s been 1,825 days since SU has won an NCAA Tournament game, which was on March 20, 2004. Or before anybody heard of Hannah Montana, before Alex Rodriguez played a single regular-season contest for the New York Yankees, before that airplane on “Lost” crashed in the South Pacific. That’s a long time.

A long time, indeed. In fact, it’s exactly five years ago, and it’s just about the time (within a couple of weeks, anyway) I committed to SU for a doctoral program of study, just about the time I said “Yes” to Syracuse. A long, long time. Long. Time.

Of course, the latest developments on Lost throw a wrench into this; that Jack et al. are now on the island in 1977 tinkers with time-space decorum ever so slightly, but, alas, it does not change the fact that the Orange have gone 0-for-the-NCAAs since I moved to town.

That will change later today, right?