Today it's time for This (Non) Sporting Life, a blog post about sport from a guy who knows little about sports.
There are certain times in life we expect life to follow some kind of dramatic narrative.
We expect that the good guy will win, will find fortune, will find love.
But life is not drama and does not always follow the script we want it to follow.
And nowhere is that more painfully real than in the world of sports.
Saturday, March 5th was a big day at Duke University. It would be the last men's basketball game to be coached by Mike Krzyzewski on campus at Cameron Indoor Stadium after 42 years. Over the course of four plus decades, the much admired and beloved Coach K had developed the Duke Blue Devils into one of the premier teams in collegiate men's basketball.
In this last home game, Duke would be playing North Carolina Tarheels. The Duke/Carolina rivalry is one of the biggest and most intense not just in men's college basketball but perhaps in all sports.
On this particular Saturday, Duke planned a party to send off Mike Krzyzewski in grand and epic style.
The dramatic narrative demanded a happy ending, one last big win for the Coach K one last time on his home court (which Duke had name "Coach K Court".)
The Tarheels had a different plan.
It was by any object analysis a good and hard fought game with over half a dozen lead changes as the Blue Devils and the Tarheels scrambled up and down the court, fighting for every single point on the score board.
While I don't know much about sports, I have watched enough basketball to sense which way the momentum is going.
With two minutes to spare and the game still within reach for Duke to win this thing, I had the sinking realization that I knew which way the momentum was going.
And that momentum was not going towards a happy ending, one last big win for Coach K one last time on his home court.
Dramatic narrative be damned, the Carolina Tarheels were writing their own story and won the game 94 to 81.
And I suppose if you're a Carolina fan, that fit fine into your dramatic narrative. A fledgling team under a new coach, struggling to find it's rhythm, losing too many games, coming into the home court of their fiercest rivals for a game they are expected to lose. And then they don't. Yep that makes for good drama.
But it was not the one that I or a lot of other people expected to play out.
I guess that's why I am not particularly big on sports. I want the dramatic narrative I expect to play out. The people playing the game have other plans.
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