Alternative programming

You can still watch Aussie Rules Football, if you can sort out the rules. Best I can tell, it's what American football would be if every player were a 'roided-up Adam Vinatieri, dropped the ball a lot and flung it around like a farmhand flinging bales of hay.

Or you can just turn on CBS, which has nothin' right now, and watch Christian Laettner step on that guy again.

Yes, that's right, America. It's not bad enough that we're all cooped up with our family units, getting on one another's last nerve. Now CBS has to torture us by replaying the 1992 Duke-Kentucky regional final in which, yes, Laettner stepped on that guy and then hit the most-replayed shot in NCAA Tournament history because Pitino didn't guard the inbounds pass.

Please, God. Not again.

But, yeah, that's what they were giving us yesterday afternoon, deepening our already depthless sense of loss. Nobody wants to see that. We want to see -- OK, so I want to see -- something else.

As a Ball State grad and confirmed masochist, I want to see my alma mater almost take down UNLV the year UNLV won it all. I want to swear at the TV again when Mike Spicer, instead of taking the shot, tries to force it down low to Paris McCurdy.

Dammit, Spicer ...

I want to see the 2002 Duke-Indiana regional game on the off chance the camera will pan press row and I'll get to see my 18-years-younger self. Or, even weirder, I want to see some IU game in the '80s on the off chance I'll see myself half a lifetime ago, when I was 32 or 33.

You poor sap. You' have NO idea what's coming. Word to the wise: Don't trust the word of a certain high school athletic director on a certain autumn night far in the future. He's going to forget and lock you in the stadium, and your fat 50-something ass is going to have to climb the fence to get out.

I want to see the Chair Game again, on the off chance there'll be a crowd shot and my wife, Julie, will be in it. She was there, you see. So was I, just a few rows down and over on press row. We didn't know each other then. In fact we wouldn't meet for five more years.

I want to see, come May, someone replay the 1989 Indianapolis 500, so I can relive the moment when the backspace key got stuck on my ancient-as-runes Teleram Portabubble, and my column started disappearing off the screen, line-by-line. That was so awesome.

I want to see the 1982 state title game again, to see if the ball really curved when Scott Skiles put up that shot. I want to see Ray Tolbert dunk again when he was just an exuberant kid at Anderson Madison Heights. I want to see Troy Lewis shoot and Steve Alford go socks-shorts-swish on the stripe, and Gene Keady with that bulldog jaw of his jutting out a mile.

I want to see a replay of some Purdue-Illinois game in the '80s, so we can relive again the epic clash between the two worst hairlines in basketball (Keady and Lou Henson.)

What I don't want to see, ever again, is Christian Laettner hitting that shot.

Dammit, Pitino ...