I’m FAR TOO INTO Duke Women’s Basketball, and I’ve admitted that in an earlier Brainstorm post. I’ve been a fan since 2002, but it has meant that my March always ends with the wrong kind of madness. In other words, these Blue Devils have been driving me crazy.
Hip-hop artist Lauryn Hill, of The Fugees fame, has a great line linking her dashed hopes as a New York basketball fan to an interpretation of the Old Testament’s tale about the Garden of Eden: “The serpent plays tricks, runs game like the Knicks, builds you up just to lose the championship.”
“Runs game” has two meanings in Hill’s formulation. It is supposed to signfy both playing basketball (getting a game started on a neighborhood court) and smooth-talking. In the latter case, “game” is the made-up story people proffer to convince their interlocutors to (foolishly) trust them.
The Blue Devils are national contenders every year. And they always win some very big games. But they never find a way to bring home that NCAA trophy. The men’s team has three, but the women have yet to win one. I get excited about their prospects at the start of every season, but it is starting to look like I’m just getting suckered/duped by slithering pre-season hype/game.
Of course, Connecticut’s team is so good this year, so much better than the rest of the field, that this wasn’t going to be the year anyway. Everyone else seems to be playing for runner-up. But the Duke women should have been able to make it past the second round. Ugh!!!!
How could this have happened? They have a confident coach. Smart and athletic players. A veteran staff. Still, they went to their new coach’s former home and got spanked by the Spartans. That shouldn’t have happened.
Granted, they were forced to play Michigan State on its home court, which is a ridiculous (even obscene) advantage this time of year. But as one of Duke’s seniors, Abby Waner, said earlier in the week, winning a national championship means being able to play anyone anywhere.
Along Tobacco Road, Duke fans might find some small solace in the fact that UNC’s team was bounced the day before. But that just makes me even more depressed. Why is the ACC Conference under-performing this March? (At least Maryland, the ACC Conference champion, is continuing to cruise.)
Since I left Duke in 2006, I have not taught any of the new recruits. And this year’s team will graduate the last player I had in class, Chante Black. (On the men’s side, David McClure is still playing this year. And he took an introductory anthropology course with me, too.) I like the new recruits, so I want to root for them next year. They have the skills to pull it off. But I am also getting tired of falling for the wrong kind of game.
