today's fun game

well, as much fun as cross-examining a witness is (actually, it was), that was not today's fun game. no, today's fun game was much more dangerous.

so i don't like basketball really at all. it's just that i never became a basketball person and i'm kind of of the opinion that either it's only the last 2 minutes that matter or that it's such a blowout that none of it really matters. but today a lot of people were heading over after trial ad to watch the uva vs. stanford game and i figured that i should go, as i never go to basketball games and there were still plenty of tickets and what else was i going to do other than prepare for tomorrow or get some much-needed rest.

well, i arrived about 30 minutes before the game started. two of us to save seats for like 7 people. as a side note, i would like to tell you to never have me save seats. the man says we are not to save seats, i say ok. fortunately, jared held his ground, and the other people were very nice. i cowered in the corner, avoiding eye contact with anyone.

but during that time, the stanford team was practicing on the half of the court immediately in front of us. well these boys were cute! and they were smart! and they were wearing black and red! and they were shooting some nice baskets! and they were the team whom i watched for 30 minutes while they shot and stretched and generally made me love them for the fact that they were just so damned tall.

so the game starts, and i am kinda miserable. my friends were late, and i am in an i hate basketball mood and i am just not feeling it.

only then i figured it out--i wasn't feeling UVA.

but there was no denying my inner cardinal. ooooooh, how i loved them. so i began to learn all of their first names, waiting for fouls and shots, jotting them down on a sheet of paper, so that i could learn everyone's first name and i could then cheer for them by first name when they made shots and blocked shots and took free throws, etc. anthony, fred, landry, mitch, brook, robin, lawrence. i loved them all. and oh! how they played as i yelled for them by name! (i have decided that the real joy of basketball as opposed to football is that you can convince yourself that the players can hear you over all the other noise, and you feel like you really can make a difference, even if you have to bide your time.) (as a side note, it turns out that they are all freshmen and sophomores! i can love this team for a few years to come!)

well, i suppose that none of this would have been so bad, were it not for the fact that when JR reynolds went to shoot his freethrows for the lead with something like 9.6 seconds left, i yelled out laura's very powerful "f$#! it up!" cheer. ok, so it's not so much a cheer as the fact that i yell that and sometimes it works. (not audibly, so that the player hears me. just loud enough to put the vibe out there and will it to happen.) well it worked today. and then lawrence made a shot and won the game for stanford, by one point, in the last 0.9 seconds!!!

and the thing is, i was SO HAPPY! i really meant it. what an ending! in the course of 2 hours, i had really come to WANT that team to win. they truly had become my team. and it was an exhilerating ending! the kind that makes you think that basketball really IS great! and that that was EXACTLY what you wanted to happen! only i was obviously in the minority on that sentiment. oops.

the kinda funny thing is that at about exactly the time i discovered my inner cardinal and decided i was going to be a stanford fan, UVA's coach took a timeout to yell at his players about something. i joked that this was b/c he knew that they had lost laura and that that was it. and i'm still going to contend that that is exactly what happened. don't mess with laura or you may lose a sporting event!