One more spring

 There was a ballgame on the radio, that April day. The sun was shining. Spring was suddenly no rumor, nor the fever-dream of souls sick of battlement-gray winter, nor even the false spring of March, faithless liar that it is. 

There was a ballgame on the radio that day.

There will be another one on the radio today.

Is it really possible 30 years separate the two?

Thirty years of minor-league baseball here in the Fort, and, whew, time flies. The 68-year-old driving this sentence was two years shy of 40 then. Bill Clinton had been in the  White House less than three months. And a 21-year-old kid from Venezuela was out there on the bump in Waterloo, Iowa, delivering pitches for a spanking new Minnesota Twins low-A affiliate called the Fort Wayne Wizards.

Thirty years later they've been re-branded the Fort Wayne TinCaps, and they're the high-A jewel in the San Diego Padres system. The Padres' top prospect, Jackson Merrill, will start at shortstop today. He's not yet 20 years old.

Thirty years of minor-league baseball in Fort Wayne. Hardly seems possible, until you think about all the years that came before.

We're a hockey town now as well as a baseball town, but before that, baseball defined us. The newly-formed National League was born here in 1871, when the Fort Wayne Kekiongas played the first game in league history against the Cleveland Forest Citys. The Kekiongas won, 2-0. A kid named Bobby Mathews, all of 20 himself, got the shutout.

And there would be more, so much more, down the road. There would be a black team called the Fort Wayne Colored Giants that played to overflow crowds on a ballfield just west of where traffic on North Clinton now rushes past. There would be the Fort Wayne Daisies of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and Red Braden's GE Voltmen.

There would be, among others, Chuck Klein and Steve Hargan and Matt Kinzer. Mike Roesler and Dave Doster and Kevin Kiermaier. Josh Van Meter from just down the road in Ossian, and Eric Wedge from Northrop High School, your American League Manager of the Year in 2007.

But never an oh-fficial MLB farm team until Eric Margenau brought the Kenosha Twins to Fort Wayne in 1993.

The night of the first home game was gray and wet and raw, but Memorial Stadium was packed and Ramon Valette hit the first home run and the home team got the W. And again there would be more, so much more, down the road.

That first summer a rangy kid from Gary with lightning in his arm -- LaTroy Hawkins was his name -- went two months without losing. The next summer, a young outfielder named Torii Hunter made catches that had sportswriters grabbing their heads in disbelief up in the pressbox. That same season, someone named Alex Rodriguez hit his first professional home run here while playing for the Appleton Foxes.

And, of course, a whole bunch of other major leaguers played here, from A.J. Pierzynski  to Fernando Tatis Jr.

And that 21-year-old kid from Venezuela?

Memory blurs as to whether he pitched the first game or the second of that doubleheader in Waterloo three decades ago. But his name was Ron Caridad, and he's 51 now. These days he lives in Miami, where he owns a floor installation business.

The Wizards split a pair that day, winning the first and losing the second.

It was early April, and the sun was shining, and a certain 38-year-old had the windows open and the ballgame on the radio, and can it really be 30 years already? Can it really?

Damn right it can.

A swordfight at the Masters

 Tomorrow the Masters begins, and so bring on the magnolias and Tiger and the Cathedral of Pines and Tiger and the flora and fauna and tinkly piano music. And Tiger.

Also, bring on the swordfights with 1-irons!

OK, so they're golfers, which means swordfights with 1-irons are out. Someone might  hurt his hand and have to change his grip.

But there are 18 golfers from the LIV Exhibition Tour in the field, and some of them have green jackets. And at least one of them (Cam Smith) was ranked No. 1 in the world before he decided collecting big-ass paychecks from gangsters for playing as indifferently as he liked sounded peachy to him.

Anyway, let the one-upmanship -- and trash-talking -- commence. None of these folks are Angel Reese so no one will object.

The majordomo of the LIV Tour, Greg "People Make Mistakes" Norman has already said if a LIV golfer wins this thing, the other 17 will congregate at the 18th green to congratulate him. He didn't say that would be a giant middle finger extended toward the PGA, but feel free to think that if you wish.

Meanwhile, the folks at Augusta National released the first and second round pairings the other day, and none of the LIV golfers are in any of the featured groups. And only Smith is paired with another golfer ranked in the top 20 in the world.

No one said this was a deliberate snub, but feel free to think that if you wish.

Tiger Woods, meanwhile, has given off the vibe this week of a man who knows sunset is upon him. He joked that he knows more players on the Senior Tour now than on the regular tour, and hinted that his days at Augusta in April may be numbered. And he says he's fine with that.

He is, after all, 47 years old with a bum leg that will likely always be a bum leg. He still has game, but maybe not enough left physically to sustain it for 72 holes.

Besides, at his age and with his infirmities, he'd be lousy at swordfighting. Fact.

As predicted

 Look, don't blame Connecticut. The Huskies were just too good. They were too good all month. And you can't fault good for being, well, good.

But after all the madness (or, Madness), after all the craziness and upset-edness and a team from Conference USA and another team from the Mountain West making the Final Four, the best team won. And it was the best team, demonstrably, all through the tournament, a little soul-crushing island of sanity in an unhinged world.

In fact they were so much the best team, these Huskies, that they sucked all the whimsy out of the most whimsical NCAA tournament in recent memory.

Last night they ball-peened San Diego State by 17 in the championship game, as predicted and to practically no one's surprise. The Huskies beat everyone put in front of them by double digits. They boat-raced 31-win Gonzaga by 28 and pancaked an Arkansas team by 23 that had just knocked off 1-seed Kansas. Miami in the national semifinal was their closest call, and that didn't exactly go down to a last-second shot.

Well. Unless Miami could have concocted a 14-point shot there at the end, seeing how UConn disposed of the Hurricanes by 13.

So the Huskies were the polar opposite of drama kings, an against-form champion of a tournament defined by drama. From 16-seed Fairleigh Dickinson knocking out 1-seed Purdue on the opening weekend to tiny Florida Atlantic's march to San Diego State beating overall 1-seed Alabama on the way to the first title game ever for a Mountain West team, it was a hell of a fun ride. 

It was also very likely a sign of things to come, here in the transfer portal/NIL era. The chaos that has attended it, with players changing schools the way motorists change lanes on an expressway, means the day you could pencil in one of the bluebloods into your Final Four every year is done. It's a have-game-will-travel world now, and its axis will shift every time this player or that decides Somewhere Else U. is the "U" for him. 

This doesn't mean the best won't still be the best, as UConn showed us. But it will play hell with trying to guess who will be the best -- because as FAU and San Diego State proved, it could be virtually anyone now.

And how's that a bad thing?

A thrashing. With trash talk.

Give the LSU Tigers this much: They brought their A-plus game on the A-plus day.

Caitlin Clark of Iowa did her Steph Curry deal, splashing eight threes from Neptune on the way to a 30-point, eight-assist afternoon in the women's national championship game. But it didn't matter a whit. She could have shot long into the night and it wouldn't have tilted the scoreboard, because LSU was not going to be beaten by her or anyone else on this day.

Fifty-four percent shooting? 

Ridiculous.

Eleven 3-pointers in 17 attempts (64.7 percent)?

Absurd.

A record 102 points in a national championship game?

You're kidding, right?

And so Kim Mulkey started to cry over there with 90 seconds to play, and Alexis Morris kept hitting jumpers and LaDazhia Williams and Angel Reese kept taking it to the tin, and an old-fashioned down-home thrashing ensued. The Tigers, who led by 17 at the half, won by 17. And then confetti fell and they were lifting the big trophy just two years after Mulkey came to Baton Rouge from Baylor, returning to her Louisiana roots.

LSU's women were 9-13 two seasons ago. They were 26-6 in Mulkey's first season, 34-2 this year. And they finished it off with a performance that might have out-glittered Mulkey's sparkly title-game pantsuit, which passing Romulans probably could have seen from space.

It was a team reflective of big-wheel college athletics’ new reality, for better or for worse. A whole pile of LSU's players came here from somewhere else, including Reese (Maryland, 15 points and 10 rebounds in the title game), graduate transfer LaDazhia Williams (Missouri, 20 points, five boards), Jasmine Carson (West Virginia, 22 points and 5-of-6 from the arc off the bench), Kateri Poole (Ohio State,  six points and three rebounds) and Morris, a fifth-year senior playing for her fourth school (Baylor, Rutgers, Texas A&M, LSU; 21 points and nine assists).

Call them Rent-A-Champions, then, if you're so inclined. But they're pretty much doing what everyone does in the era of the transfer portal. Best get used to it.

Best get used to watching women's buckets now, too, because a lot of people did. So much so, that Clark went viral with her Steph-back threes and swagger, and Reese went viral with the sort of intertoobz firestorm that only happens when people are paying attention.

I'm talking, of course, about Reese looking at Clark and pointing to her ring finger when the game was done, and then doing the whole John Cena "You can't see me" hand-waving in front of her face.

It was playground taunting and utterly classless given the setting, and Reese, who is black, was roundly and rightly bashed for it. What wasn't so right was that Reese stole the Cena thing from Clark, who is white and did the same bit last week.

Social media never uttered a peep about that bit of classless taunting. And (mea culpa) that includes the guy driving this Blob.

So it blew up, of course, the way everything blows up these days. But you know what?

Just a few years ago it wouldn't have. Because America, or a good chunk of it anyway, wouldn't have been tuning in.

Call it progress.

'Bout damn time

 Word came down yesterday about the 2023 Basketball Hall of Fame class, and look who's in it: Old Bad Breakfast Guy himself.

That would be Gene Keady, of course, and as with a lot of things involving Keady there's a story about Bad Breakfast Guy. One afternoon he took his Purdue Boilermakers up to Michigan State and they had an almighty tussle with Tom Izzo's Spartans, but in the end the Spartans prevailed. And here came Keady, not exactly growling about the refs but talking about one particular call by one particular ref.

The ref, Keady told us, said he was sorry about missing the call. But he'd had a bad breakfast and he wasn't feeling well.

"A bad breakfast?" Keady barked. "We're tryin' to win a game here, and he's talking about a bad breakfast?"

There are a million Gene moments like that, and anyone who covered his Boilers incorporated them into the Gene Keady impressions they all had down pat. "What the hell's goin' on?" was a standard Keady observation on the state of basketball/the world. "Typical media s***" was another.

And then, of course, as night follows day, there was "Why wouldn't you want to play hard?" -- "playing hard" being one of Keady's bedrock mantras.

The Purdues always played hard, when Keady rode their bench. They might not always beat you, but you knew you'd been in a basketball game when you played them.

It's why the man took Purdue to 17 NCAA tournaments and won 493 games and was the Big Ten Coach of the Year a record seven times. And it's also why it's about damn time he's going to Springfield, the Hall of Fame being somewhere he's belonged long before now.

Keady would never say that himself, of course, because he was never one to waste time with self-absorption. Behind those scowls and that bulldog jaw jutting out a mile was a far more gracious man than his public persona suggested. If he got mad at you for something, he never stayed mad. Unlike his great rival down in Bloomington, he didn't nurse grudges like they were family heirlooms.

Quick story: Back in the day the newspaper for which I worked got an anonymous letter accusing Keady of all sorts of shenanigans. Although as far as I know no one questioned the provenance of the letter, we took it and ran with it, running story after story for months that mostly amounted to not much.

In the midst of all this, Keady showed up in town to watch some potential future Boilers play. I approached him -- warily -- for a quote or two. When I told him who I was and what paper I was with, he kind of reared back and looked at me.

"You guys haven't been treatin' me very nice," he said.

And then gave me the quote or two I was looking for.

That was Gene Keady.

On beating the buzzer

 Couple more seconds. That's all we're talking about here, right?

Couple more seconds before you had to attack the rim, and maybe they're not celebrating over there on the San Diego State end. Couple more seconds, and maybe Lamont Butler doesn't get down the floor far enough, maybe he has to launch from farther away and with less form, maybe the ball kicks off the front rim or hits the back rim too hard or skims away off the side of the rim.

Couple more seconds.

Ah, the parsing of time and dissection of what-if that attends the beating of the buzzer.

One flick of the wrist last night -- one launching of the basketball in the right parabolic flight -- and San Diego State is playing for a national title. One flick of the wrist, and Florida Atlantic, the story of Da Tournament, is going home after blowing a 14-point  lead and never trailing in the second half until that very last flick of the wrist.

Elsewhere this night UConn would continue what looks more and more like an inevitable march to the title Monday night, jumping out 9-0 on Miami and never looking back. The 72-59 final score was their closest call of the tournament. No else has finished within 15 points of them.

But the One Shining Moment of this night had already happened by then.

It belonged to Lamont Butler, rushing up the floor and pulling up for a mid-range jumper that splashed down as the horn sounded.  It was every kid's driveway hero skit playing out for real, in real time: Three ... two ... one .. Butler shoots! Butler scores!

Rarely does any other moment in sports result in such instantaneous elation and mourning. Or the instantaneous reversal of the two.

For Florida Atlantic, it was a tear-your-heart-out end to a magical run that has defined this tournament more than anything else. And if Dusty May and his players might not be inclined to dwell on what would have happened if they'd had a couple more seconds to drain off the clock before trying to draw the foul, the rest of us will happily indulge.

Couple more seconds.

One season ends in that eyeblink, and one goes on that looked for a long time as if it were ending. It doesn't get better than that.

Or worse.

One CC of fun

 I don't know how you can play a game much better than Caitlin Clark and Iowa played the game of basketball last night, knocking out undefeated South Carolina and ending the Gamecocks 42-game winning streak in the women's national semifinals. I'm sure that small cadre of sad creatures who still hate women's sports will tell us how.

But the women's tournament keeps putting up big TV numbers and selling out arenas while the scalpers get three times for tickets  what they got even a year ago, and last night will only help their business. Iowa-South Carolina was exactly what everyone thought it would be, and Caitlin Clark was once more a CC of fun and then some.

Five days after she set social media on fire with a 41-point, 12-assist, 10-rebound symphony in the Elite Eight, she did it again last night in the Final Four. Again she went for 41, this time accompanied by eight assists and six boards, as the best defensive team in the nation proved helpless to stop her. Again she hauled her team along with her, accounting for 58 of Iowa's 77 points in the 77-73 win.

The woman is a gold filigree legend now, doing things unseen either forever or for a very long time. Her 41 points last night was the most scored in a women's Final Four game since Sheryl Swoopes went for 47 against Ohio State -- 30 years ago. And only one person has ever gone for back-to-back 40s in the history of the women's tournament.

That would be Caitlin Clark. She stands alone there.

She and the Hawkeyes get LSU in the title game tomorrow night, and that's a story, too. In just her second season since leaving Baylor to return to her home state, head coach Kim Mulkey has the Tigers playing for the championship after kicking to the curb the  other 1-seed, Virginia Tech. Even she admitted it was "crazy."

Crazier yet if the Tigers find a way to slow down Clark and win the title.

Even crazier if they can't, and CC Of Fun does it one last time.