Darts and Pats
A Pat to Lacrosse for earning the #5 seed in the Women’s NCAA Tourney. They host Stanford this Saturday at 1 p.m. Not sure if you can get WLax scores on SportsTap but make sure and check the ticker on ESPNU if you’re watching the Nats on Saturday night.
A Dart to the Media Relations folks. Rumor has it the Richmond Ticks already released their portion of the 2010 football CAA television schedule. Get on it.
A Pat to Women’s Tennis for earning the National Team Sportsmanship Award from the Intercollegiate Tennis Association. Mentioning this on the blog feels as ridiculous as the Mystics hanging WNBA attendance banners at the Verizon Center, but with some of the less than stellar student behavior drawing headlines lately, we applaud the ladies on something positive for a change.
A Dart to slacker Season Ticket Holders, TODAY is the priority deadline for renewing your seats and getting your Duke Club Deposit in. Make the call. I mean, Drew’s already been named the starter, so you know it’s gonna be a good season!
A Pat to old friend of JMUSB Jimmy Bonnell for getting things squared away early for the 8th Annual JB Classic benefitting PUSH America and the JMU College of Business’ Madison Business Scholarship Fund. Having it on Liberty game weekend should seriously help attendance. Check out the details here.
Lastly, a bit of commentary (fair warning – this is incredibly self-indulgent and I’d put a jump on the page if I’d figured that out yet): So I just finished watching the Cleveland Cavaliers epic collapse, just a few weeks after watching the Washington Capitals epic collapse. It got me thinking about fan misery and I must confess I realized something shocking. I honestly think the semi-final loss to Montana two years ago ranks among my top five disappointments as a sports fan. And it’s definitely the only one that still stings. Given that it’s really all about investment, I’d actually say it might really be #2 (I’d been to five straight games at that point and was just certain of a return trip to Chattanooga). Plus when you’re mainly a DC Sports fan, your teams just are really never good enough to disappoint.
I’m not really a huge hockey fan, so I don’t think I can go overboard on lamenting Ovie and Co.
Skins/Raiders was the cherry-popper of fan disappointment in my life and may never be topped. It only got worse when I was old enough for my dad to explain what “Tampa Week” had been like for Dexter, Riggo, and the boys. Since then, the Skins either came through (pre-Snyder) and won or weren’t really favored enough to hurt that bad (Norv playoff team and both Gibbs 2.0 playoff teams).
The Jeffrey Mayer play/series was pretty tough, but I grew to loathe the O’s, Angelos, and most things Bal’mor, plus now we finally have the Nats, so that’s really faded. Bullets/Wizards have never really been good enough for a crushing playoff collapse. Don’t get me wrong, the season-long crushing of spirts in the CWebb/Juwann era and the Gil/AJ/Tuff Juice “leading at the break” season were tough, but I never really believed they’d be crying and kissing the big gold ball (twss).
The US National Team’s entire performances at the ’98 World Cup and the Czech game to start ’06 were pretty bad, but again, I had tempered expectations from the outset on both occasions. That said, this summer holds incredibly high danger potential for investment/disappointment ratio.
Finally, a quick honorable mention to the Major Harris led WVU team’s NC loss to Notre Dame in the ’88 Fiesta Bowl.
Oh yeah, and Rob’s a Mets and Giants fan, so he could write 10,000 words on this.
Agree about the sting of the semi-final loss to Montana. I still think that year’s team was the best in the country and I’m not sure we’ll see a better JMU team for a while.
And yes, I could write 10,000 words on the soul crushing nature of the Mets multiple September collapses. It really hit home in 2008 when I was wearing my Met hat and some old guy in a Red Sox hat walked over to me, patted me on the shoulder, and told me that things would get better. He wasn’t even being an ass. He was legitimately trying to console me. That’s when I realized I had officially entered some sort of bizarro sports universe. But anyway, yeah the loss to Montana still eats at me.
The Montana loss does eat at me but I have to say the Mets in ’06 were tough. Rob and I went to the first playoff game against the Dodgers and saw the play where J.D. Drew and Jeff Kent got tagged out at home. I then watched the game where Endy Chavez made the great catch yet the Mets lost to the Cards in the NLCS from a hospital bed high on morphine. Wait. Maybe it wasn’t that bad.