TV basketball mesmerizes Minnesotans
Well, Minnesota, we've done it again. We've overdosed on TV basketball.
Between the high school tournaments and the college tournaments, we've spent an entire month on the sofa, watching game after game, some of us acquiring sofa-sized derrieres in the process -- all of us transfixed by the graceful young giants racing up and down the court, putting the ball in the basket on the screen across the room.
Up the court. Down the court. Up the court. Down the court. Hour after hour. Day after day.
And still we watched.
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How could we not? The game and the medium exuded a diabolically mesmerizing rhythm.
A few minutes of play. Two minutes of commercials. A few minutes of play. Two minutes of commercials. And so on and so forth until halftime, when they sent us back to the studios for updates on games elsewhere (following two minutes of commercials, of course.)
And, at the end of halftime, they sent us back to the game - right after two minutes of commercial messages.
There were all those little morality plays. The ebb. The flow. The momentum shifts. The good guys. The bad guys. The Davids. The Goliaths. The favorites. The long shots. The hard-working and deserving blue-collar teams. The much-despised pampered, rich, privileged programs. The Cinderellas. The buzzer beaters.
There was the food - all the pizzas and nachos and chips and dip. There was the all-but-palpable, nearly-impossible-to-ignore wave of guilt and resentment emanating from family members and roommates unaffected by the basketball frenzy as they moved about the room, tidying up, vacuuming, blocking our view of the game. Luckily, we managed to ignore them.
And it ended so quickly. One minute it's February and conference play is going full tilt. The next minute it's April and we're down to the Final Four.
There's an air of anticlimax to it all now. A depressing sense of pre-postpartum. A coming to our senses. Basketball season is ending with a whimper again this year, Face it, Minnesota. We're done. The Timberwolves will play on, but they were done months ago.
It would be the saddest week of the year except the Twins first game of the season is the same night as the NCAA men's final game.
Bring some chips and dip. I'll save you a spot on the other end of the couch.
