The End

Last night, the West Virginia Mountaineers beat the Kentucky Wildcats in the Elite Eight, ending our run and our dream season.¹ I thought I would have been a lot more upset about it than I am.² Lynn and I talked about it last night while slogging through another terrible episode of Saturday Night Live.³ This season has been so great and so much fun that it's really hard to get mad about losing this one game. I wanted to write something before I started to read all the breakdowns and commentary from around the internets so my opinion wouldn't be colored by anything anyone else had to say, so here goes.

As for the game itself, WVU is by far the best team we played this year.⁴ I had a bad feeling about the game for that reason, and Kentucky message boards and blogs weren't helping me out. Leading up to our other two losses, I had noticed an extremely high amount of fan hubris on those sites, and it was the same going into this game. Why our fan base would choose to get cocky going into a game with the best two-seed in the tournament when the same fan base had really sweated Cornell is beyond me. You can only read "ZOMG their point guard broke his foot GO CATS" and "Billy Gillispie beat this team last year, they must suck LOL" so many times before you start to worry that the universe is going to have its revenge.

Anyway, I think Bob Huggins knew there was only one way he was going to beat UK--hit threes early. They did. The announcers talked at length about WVU not being a three point shooting team, but they shot over 33% for the year--not great, but not too shabby either. UK simply could not hit threes--once we began hitting, we were too far in the hole to come back and because time was running low, we had to put them on the free throw line every time down the court for the last two point five minutes.

Their ability to hit big shots, and our inability to do same, is not the whole story. I think the two coaches' perimeter defensive plans were the same--let them shoot, and if they beat you from beyond the line, they beat you from beyond the line. Last night, that worked out for WVU and not for us. Beyond that, Huggins outcoached Calipari. Because we couldn't hit threes, used a 1-3-1 zone to pack players in the interior while still keeping them in position to challenge threes. And during the second half, Huggins took great advantage of our wariness of letting them have the outside shot to run a lot of great cuts and screens to get his guys to the basket for easy shots. Our inability to hit free throws didn't help either.

So, that's likely the last time Patrick Patterson, John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins put on UK uniforms.⁵ And that sucks. Patterson has been the backbone of this team for three years. He's been here through thick and thin. And I will hate to see him go. I was wary we would get OJ Mayo, Jr., with Wall and/or Cousins--a foul-tempered ballhog on the take who, for all his individual greatness, cannot lead a team to an excellent season. To me, Wall and Cousins defied every stereotype of the "one and done" player--they were selfless on the court and very involved with the school off it. It's been particularly special to watch Cousins' evolution over the year. He's gone from potential team-wrecker--John Carlson told me before the season to watch out because Cousins had physically fought a high school coach--to a fan favorite. After reading about all the things Cousins had to go through in high school (admittedly some of which were self-created) to see him evolve into a great basketball player and a good kid off the court has been great. Maybe all these guys will pull a Florida 2005 and decide to return. I doubt it, but it will be nice to think about.

The four years preceeding this season were rough. I watched every game I could, but I was never excited about it. That all changed this year. Even though we lost this game, I am proud to be a fan of this team.

More to come at some point, but thinking about all this has kind of mentally worn me out. Go Cats.

¹I freely use the pronouns "we" and "our" when referring to University of Kentucky sports. That bothers some people, but I find it convenient. For some reason, though, I hate it when people say "my" when referring to their preferred team, i.e., "my Wildcats."

²That doesn't mean my language during the game wasn't foul. It was. Lynn has said more than once that she thinks God is going to jinx UK because of my bad language during games, that it counteracts all the praying for our team that she does.

³If Don friggin Draper can't make your show worth a damn, it never will be.

⁴We tried to schedule good teams--UNC, UCONN, Louisville--but they all ended up having off seasons, so with the exception of UT and Vanderbilt, we didn't play any teams that ended up in the top 25 at the end of the regular season.

⁵Apparently some experts have Eric Bledsoe and, of all people, Daniel Orton going lottery to late first round in the NBA draft. I really think both of these guys, and especially Orton, could benefit from one more year.