All Boilered up

 OK, then. UConn vs. Purdue, for all of it.

The defending national champions vs. a proud basketball school that somehow hasn't played in a national championship game since there were laces on the basketball -- and, listen, if you bleed black-and-old-gold and you're not invoking the spirit of Terry Dischinger or Rick Mount or the Big Dog or whoever, you just ain't tryin' hard enough. Because the only thing the proud basketball school is missing is a banner.

And I don't know if they get it this time, either.

I don't know if anyone beats UConn, which fiddled around with Alabama before turning it on late and winning by 14 in the Final Four semis. I don't know if you can beat a team with that kind of talent and that kind of drive and that many ways to murdalize you, which is why the Huskies have murdalized everyone who's stood in their path so far in this tournament run.

However.

However, what I just wrote about UConn you could write about Purdue, too.

The Boilermakers didn't bring their A game last night against North Carolina State, and point guard Braden Smith barely brought his D game, and still they wore down the Wolfpack in the second half to win by 13. Smith scored just three points on 1-of-9 shooting , but the "1" was a three-ball that gave the Boilers an 18-point cushion down the stretch.

And, yeah, you can say the Purdues got away with one, if only because North Carolina State was a 14-loss team and an 11-seed. But the Wolfpack won the ACC tournament by beating Duke and North Carolina, and then they beat 6-seed Texas Tech by 13 and 2-ssed Marquette by nine and 4-seed Duke again, this time by 12, to get to the Final Four.  So they weren't exactly pushovers.

And Purdue?

Well, Purdue did Purdue things. And by that I mean "things that win basketball games."

Smith, for instance, turned it over five times against the Wolfpack, a mortal sin for a point guard. But he also took eight rebounds and dished six assists, and Zach Edey dropped a 20-point, 12-rebound double-double on a North Carolina State front line with some beef to it, and Purdue made 10 threes on a night when it had to make threes.

Oh, and the defense harassed the Wolfpack into 36.8 percent shooting, including 26.3 percent (5 of 19) from the arc.

It wasn't pretty, but it never is because this is not a pretty team. It's a Purdue team, is what it is. It wins with less style than UConn does, but with every bit the will and passion.

In short, Monday night will be a Gene Keady kind of night: Two teams whose mantra was Keady's mantra. Play Hard!

And if you're looking for ultimately meaningless omens for this one, a couple of things to consider: The zone of totality, and 1969.

The first because Monday a total eclipse cuts a broad swath right smack through the heart of Indiana, and, well, everyone said the sun would go  black before Purdue ever won a national title.

And the second?

The second is that one previous national championship game appearance, won by John Wooden and his UCLA legions over Rick Mount, Billy Keller, Herm Gilliam and Purdue in a 92-72 rout. And it was UCLA who had dominant post player in that matchup: Lew Alcindor/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. 

This time?

This time, of course, it's Purdue who has Edey.

Maybe it's karma. Maybe it's nothing. You decide.

That call

 You want to listen to Paige Bueckers this morning, because the young woman is as right as ham on rye. You want to listen to the kid because her head's screwed on straight and, even in the immediate aftermath of a crushing defeat, her wide-angle perspective is 20/20.

That offensive foul on Buecker's UConn teammate Aaliyah Edwards that Iowa's Gabby Marshall sold and the game officials bought?

Didn't cost UConn the game.

Didn't cost it the game even if it happened with 3.9 ticks left, UConn down one with the ball and plenty of time for hero shot.

Buecker's take on that?

"Everybody can make a big deal out of that one single play, but not one single play wins a basketball game," she said after Iowa won 71-69 to reach the national championship game for the second straight year.

 Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am with a cherry on top.

First things first: The call on Edwards was one of the worst calls you're ever going to see. Marshall's chasing Bueckers, Edwards steps out to set a hard screen ... and, whoa, Marshall runs into it and bounces off it like Ricochet Rabbit (an admittedly ancient reference, so no geezer jokes, please). Even exercised a little dramatic license by flinging her arms up in the air.

Yeah, she sold it. And the refs bought it. And it sealed the W for the Hawkeyes.

But it didn't decide anything, as Bueckers said. It certainly contributed to the decision, but it wasn't the only thing that did.

Every athletic contest is a ladder of "what-ifs", see, and there are any number of steps to that ladder. What if UConn, which had a 12-point lead with 5:24 remaining in the first half, hadn't gone the next three minutes without scoring, allowing Iowa to cut the lead in half by halftime? What if Caitlin Clark doesn't go 3-of-5 from the 3-point arc in the second half after  missing all six of her tries from Threeville in the first half?

What if Clark doesn't score 15 of her 21 points in the second half? What if Iowa doesn't outrebound UConn by eight? What if Edwards does a better job inside against Hannah Stuelke, who led all scorers with 23 points?

What if Bueckers hits one more three? Or Edwards one more two?

Then the bogus call doesn't matter. Then Marshall makes her Oscar bid for nothing.

But because none of the above happened, it did matter. And it wasn't for nothing.

And we're all talking about it.

Travelin' men

 I hate to fly.

I hate everything about it, from the TSA shakedown ("Take off your shoes, socks, pants, underwear and that nose ring, please") to the flight delays ("We have been informed your flight is enroute and will be here a week from Thursday in 2035") right on up  to the group boarding ("If you are in Group 247, you may board now").

I hate the guy who insists on cramming his steamer trunk in the overhead bin.. I hate "We are now 137th in line for takeoff." And mostly I hate being stuffed into the seating like cattle into a chute, and realizing that for the next four hours my knees will be getting intimate with my chin. 

In other words, I sympathize with Dan Hurley and his UConn Huskies, and the airline nightmare they endured to get to the Final Four.

Equipment issues. Pilots timing out with no replacements available. Weather delays.

I feel their pain. 

I just don't think it's all that painful, basketball-wise.

"I ruminated a lot," Hurley said of the Huskies' ordeal. "I spiraled. I had my head in my hands a lot. It was a real mindful exercise from 11:30 to like 1:45 on the tarmac."

Again, I get it. And, again, I'm compelled to say, "Oh, please."

I mean, Hurley made it sound like Frank Pembleton was sweating him in the box on "Homicide: Life On The Street," the best cop show of all time. He wasn't. It was just regular flying crap --  which is no fun, but isn't exactly the Spanish Inquisition.

And even if the Huskies finally arrived in Phoenix at the ungodly hour of 3:15 a.m. Thursday local time ...

Well. I'm not very good at math, but even I can figure out that means UConn arrived  roughly 66 hours before the tip of its national semifinal against Alabama.

I figure that's plenty of time for everyone to catch up on their sleep. Plenty of time for the Huskies to get back into their routine, and to make the proper preparations for sending 'Bama back to Tuscaloosa in sandwich bags.

Even Hurley finally seemed to understand that, once he was done drama queening.

"Who doesn't deal with problems with the airlines?" he said at one point Thursday afternoon.

No one I know.

Cruds break!

 We're a week into the baseball season now, and I'm looking at the National League standings, and, whoa, what's this?  My Pittsburgh Pira-

Excuse me. You in the back there, wildly waving your hand.

"I have to go to the bathroom!"

"But didn't you just go?"

"Yeah, but I gotta go again! Like, real bad! Just came on me kinda sudden!"

"Is it because I mentioned my Pittsburgh Pira-"

"Ahhh! Here it comes again! I REALLY gotta go!"

And, yeah, OK, I get it after all these years: Some people will do anything to bail on a Blob post about my Cruds.

But, hey! I don't care! 'Cause holy Rennie Stennett, they have the best record in the National League! 5-1 to start the season, baby!

And, yeah, before you ask, I know what's going on. They're jerking me around the way the Cruds always do. I am prepared for this. I am prepared for them to haul off and win a bunch of games for a week or two or maybe a month, and I'll start to think "Hmm, maybe Bob Nutting knows what he's doing", and then I'll catch myself and say "What are you, nuts?"

And pretty soon they'll be in last place again, their ancestral NL Central home. They ain't foolin' me.

Though I always wish they would.

Anthem angst, Part Infinity

 The outer boundaries of the American mind are where no man (or woman) should ever go, but sometimes the Blob can't help itself. Lunatics fascinate me. They also make me see red sometimes, until I remember they're lunatics and can't help themselves.

Example for this morning: Remember all that super-patriot performance outrage that went on when a bunch of NFL players knelt with their heads bowed for the National Anthem in silent protest of racial injustice?

It's baaa-aack!

This time the Outer Boundaries got their shorts in a bunch because the other night the LSU women's basketball team WALKED OFF THE FLOOR DURNG THE NATIONAL ANTHEM. How disrespectful! How un-American! Why, they should have been immediately THROWN OUT OF THE TOURNAMENT!

As someone surely has said: And now for the reality check.

One, LSU's team did not walk off the floor during the National Anthem started. They were off the floor well before then.

Two, they were following the routine Kim Mulkey's teams have always followed, which is to leave the floor with 12 minutes left in warm-ups, go back to the locker room and, as Mulkey patiently explained later, go over their pregame stuff.

It wasn't intentional. It wasn't a protest. It wasn't a slap at the anthem or the flag or the troops or 'Merica. It was just a basketball team hewing to its normal routine the way every basketball team led by a detail-obsessed coach hews to its normal routine.

Now, I don't have the numbers to back this up, but I bet if you dug into it, you'd find a whole pile of teams that aren't on the floor for the National Anthem. Iowa was that night not because it's more patriotic or 'Merican or because its players were raised better, but because it was part of Hawkeyes' coach Lisa Bluder's routine. Every successful coach has one, and you mess with it at your peril.

Pageantry is pageantry, you see. But basketball is basketball.

So Mulkey took her team to the locker room, and Bluder didn't. And if you think that was some sort of protest approved by Mulkey, I'd love to know what you've been smoking. Because like a lot of authoritarian coaches, Mulkey's as right wing as right wing gets. She'd sooner cut off a limb, or one of her player's limbs, than let them intentionally kneel or turn their backs or raise a gloved fist during the anthem.

Now, as it turns out, LSU was thrown out of the tournament later that night. But it wasn't karma or cosmic forces or the ghost of George Washington coming down from on high to smite the Tigers with his righteous anger.

Nah. Mostly it was Mulkey putting Hailey Van Lith on Caitlin Clark, and Clark lighting her up for 41 points and nine threes and 15 assists. Mostly it was Iowa defending a little better at one end, and beating LSU down the floor before the Tigers could set up at the other end.

In other words, it was basketball that sent LSU home.

Just as it was basketball that took the Tigers off the floor and into the locker room  before the National Anthem was played, and America's lunatic fringe lost its damn mind.

Appointment viewing

 Maybe you had to be there then, to appreciate the road to now. Maybe you can't fathom how long the journey has been, the leaps and bounds it's made, unless you were in a tiny high school gym almost 50 years ago on the day a couple of girls basketball teams played in front of almost no one.

I was in that gym, see. And leaps and bounds ain't the half of it.

The year was 1977, the high school gym was in Lapel, In., and the two girls basketball teams were playing a sectional game when sectional basketball games for girls were still so new you could hear the crackle of the wrapper they came in. It was just the second year for the IHSAA girls tournament, and there were a gazillion turnovers that day and a bazillion jump balls. It was basketball, but only vaguely.

I 5hought about that last night as I watched Caitlin Clark and Iowa and Angel Reese and LSU race up and down the floor in front of a packed house in Albany, N.Y. I thought about the turnovers and the jump balls and the scattering of fans in that game 47 years ago. I thought about how, in those days, the girl who could dribble up the floor without looking at the basketball was the wonder of the age.

What I saw last night did not resemble that in the slightest.

What I saw last night was solar systems and galaxies and light years beyond 1977, a  game so entirely different the girls of '77 literally could not have imagined it possible. They would have been cavewomen staring at fire, watching what Clark and Reese and the rest were doing. 

To be sure, it is not the men's game, as the misogynists who miss the point insist on reminding us.  But if you couldn't appreciate what it was -- if you couldn't marvel at the spectacle it has become -- you simply didn't know what you were watching.

I know what I was watching. I was watching basketball.

I was watching Caitlin Clark sling threes and Angel Reese command the paint and two teams of whip-smart players play the game at cartoon speed. I was watching two teams penetrate and dish and reverse the ball and find the open look, and burying that look more often than not.

It was a rematch of last year's national championship game, and it lived up to the billing. Reese went for 17 points and 20 rebounds and four assists before fouling out late on a suspect call. Clark dropped 41 points and nine threes and dished a dozen dimes. And Iowa won 94-87 to advance to the Final Four.

Where the Hawkeyes will face UConn and Paige Bueckers, who sidelined top-seed USC and freshman phenom JuJu Watkins. Bueckers, who's been on a positive tear since the tournament began, went for 28 points and 10 rebounds to lead the Huskies. Watkins scored 29 for USC to finish the season as the highest-scoring freshman in the history of the women's game.

Bueckers vs, Clark in the Final Four. Think that's not appointment viewing?

Think it's not as intriguing a matchup as you're going to see on the men's side?

Think, "Yeah, but it's not the same game"?

Then you've missed the point. Again. 

The point being, it's basketball. And not just basketball, but damn glorious basketball.

Marvel at it or miss out.

Final(ly) Four

 We begin with a refresher of sorts, on the morning after Zach Edey and Co. took the Purdue Boilermakers where no Boilermaker has gone before, or at least since a day lost in the mists of time.

In other words, class: Just how long ago was March 1980, the last time Purdue reached the Final Four?

Well, in March 1980, Jimmy Carter was still president.

Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were NBA rookies.

John Lennon was still nine months away from meeting Mark David Chapman.

John Belushi was alive. Tiger Woods was 4. The Star Wars franchise was still just one movie; the Star Trek franchise still just one TV series; and  no one in West Lafayette, In., had yet heard of a man named Gene Keady, then the 43-year-old head basketball coach at Western Kentucky.

A month later he was the new head coach at Purdue.

Forty-four years after that, on the last day of March, a 7-foot-4 Boilermaker 66 years Keady's junior clipped a few strands of net in Detroit, Mich., then marched over and handed him a strand. And hugged him.

I don't know if you can call that closing a circle, or anything so high-falutin' and cosmic.  But it sure as hell was something.

It was something because the program Gene Keady built on guts and will and the decidedly un-cosmic mantra of Play Hard finally reached a place he could never quite take it, and here was Zach Edey acknowledging it even if he never played for the man. This is, after all, Matt Painter's program now. But damned if it still doesn't have Gene Keady's fingerprints all over it.

Everything about this team breathes Keady, and it was hard not to see that Sunday as Edey punished Tennessee with 40 points and 18 boards, and Braden Smith and Fletcher Loyer and all the rest gutted out an uncharacteristically lousy shooting day. These Boilers, they are tough and relentless and selfless in a way hardly seen anymore, and did we mention tough and relentless.

Sure, Tennessee dinged them for 11 threes in 26 attempts to keep it close. But the Purdues harassed the Volunteers into 13-of-36 shooting from everywhere else -- 36 percent, if you're keeping score at home. And when the Vols missed, Edey or someone else was there to clean up the mess; Purdue finished with a gargantuan 47-26 advantage on the glass, perhaps the biggest reason it survived and advanced.

And what is rebounding, boys and girls? What is getting in the face of the shooter?

Thaaat's right. Ain't nothin' but Play Hard. Ain't nothin' but settin' the jaw and gettin' after it.

And so the Boilers set their jaws and got after it -- has anyone ever set his jaw like Braden Smith, for pity's sake? -- and Edey got a huge block as the outcome teetered, and then he took a pair of scissors and went snip-snip-snip. And then he handed most of what he snipped to Gene Keady, because without Gene Keady there's no Matt Painter, and without Matt Painter and the Keady legacy upon which he has so worthily built, there's no Final Four for the first time in 44 years.

Hang onto that hunk of nylon, Coach. It's been a long time in coming.