Pur-didn't

The shock this morning is not that little ol' St. Peter's did it AGAIN, or that Purdue March-barfed all over itself AGAIN, or that this is the maddest Madness ever, and therefore the most wonderful Madness ever.

No, sirree. The shock is that there's actually a National Peacock Day, and how did we all miss that? 

Maybe the betting lines change if more of us knew Purdue was playing the St. Peter's Peacocks on National Peacock Day. This was surely the bad omen of all omens for the Purdues. Another is that the Peacocks have some damn fine guards.

Damn fine guards win for you in March, and so on St. Peter's goes to the Elite Eight, the first 15-seed ever to do so. And back to West Lafayette go the Boilermakers with a basketball team that played its worst basketball at the worst possible time.

Certainly St. Peter's backcourt pressure had something to do with that, harassing Purdue into 15 turnovers and its presumptive NBA star, Jaden Ivey, into an ugly 4-of-12, nine-point, six-turnover night. But Purdue was a willing helpmate, too, going 5-of-21 (23.8 percent) from the 3-point arc and 23-of-54 overall.

With the exception of Trevion Williams, who led Purdue with 16 points and eight rebounds, the Boilermakers failed to exploit their glaring size advantage. Zach Edey was a 7-foot-4 lamppost, scoring 11 points, taking just two rebounds and turning it over five times. The 17 minutes he played would have been better served going to Williams, who played little more than half the game.

I don't know if this was Purdue's worst tournament loss ever, because that covers a lot of waterfront. But it's in the front row of the team picture. And what makes that so is because so much was expected of this team, and it produced so little in return.

(Which is why it's hard for me to buy that this is the "best team in school history." That, too, covers a lot of waterfront. Better than the Glenn Robinson-Cuonzo Martin team that went to the Elite Eight? Better then the Triplets of the 1980s? Better than the Final Four team in 1980, or the 1969 Final Four team, with Rick Mount and Herm Gilliam and Billy Keller.?)

A team some smart guys seriously considered a potential Final Four team ended up not winning much of anything. It didn't win the Big Ten regular season title. It didn't win the Big Ten Tournament. And it crashed and burned against a 15-seed in the Sweet Sixteen, two long steps from the Final Four.

The Blob never saw these Boilers as a Final Four team, but it takes no bows for that (nor wants to, having grown up in a Purdue household). What it saw was an extremely talented, well-coached team that nonetheless had an odd tendency to barely beat teams it should have been blowing out. That didn't bode well for March, in my opinion.

Smarter people probably could tell you why that was, or why I'm full of a smelly substance. All I know is, Purdue's season ended with another thud, and this one was all the louder for the expectations that attended that season.

But all is not lost. At least we know when National Peacock Day is now.