Columbus, One Week Later

Timeliness does not appear to be a strong suit of this blog, so I doubt many of you are surprised by a week’s delay in my second-round report. The benefit, though, is some perspective on Virginia Tech’s first NCAA appearance in eleven years.

Sunday was a long day. I was up by eight, had my Timmy’s by 10, and was checked out of the hotel for good by 11:30 for what turned out to be over five hours of basketball, thanks to a rather extended UVa-Tennessee match; I didn’t hit Interstate 670 post-game until 5:30, and it was 10 minutes to midnight by the time I got home. Five hours in an arena was brain-numbing, Interstate 70 through eastern Ohio wasn’t any better, and then it got dark. I was ridiculously happy to see traffic and the occasional streetlight by the time I rejoined 70 from 68 in Hancock, MD. Conclusion: don’t do this kind of thing solo again. (Of course, that wasn’t the original plan anyway — thanks, Southwest!)

In retrospect, all that talk about us being a different team and more capable of beating Southern Illinois than we had been in November would have been applicable in early February, but not March. SIU followed the same basic pattern we saw over and over in the last month of the season: guard Zabian Dowdell very tight, keep Deron Washington from penetrating (and thereby posterizing your interior defense) at all costs, and work the shot clock until the open 3-pointer appears with 2-3 seconds left. (For that matter, so did Illinois; their refusal to finish off the 3 was what eventually killed them.) Compounding the problems, A.D. Vassallo went ice-cold, and Seth Greenberg left him in the game far, far too long; with A.D.’s confidence went the team’s chances of pulling back into the game after SIU’s take-charge run at the end of the first half.

That’s my only major complaint about the basketball, though. We finished the season as a decent team, but clearly not top-echelon; SIU was one notch better, as they showed four days later in San Jose by taking Kansas to the wire.

As for the trip:

• I made it slightly more entertaining by using Thursday afternoon to drive US 50 all the way from Fairfax to Parkersburg, WV, then continuing Friday on 50 to US 33 to Columbus. Once you get past Winchester, it’s actually a fun road, following the old Northwestern Pike all the way to I-79 in Clarksburg, and continuing west on the Corridor D superhighway upgrade to Parkersburg. There’s not much on it in West Virginia outside of the Clarksburg and Parkersburg areas, but the scenery’s beautiful even on a cold, gray day.
  
• Staying in West Virginia Thursday night also gave me one highly entertaining moment, when the local CBS affiliate’s sportscaster opened his NCAA report by stating that the tournament opened missing the WVU Mountaineers. My automatic retort, straight out of Office Space: “I wouldn’t say it was missing them, Bob.”
• Ohio is sprinkled with Tim Hortons locations, a legacy of their temporary ownership by Columbus-headquartered Wendy’s; one even made it over the Ohio River into downtown Parkersburg. While as a Virginian and hockey fan, I find it an absolute travesty that West Virginia gets a Timmy’s before the real Virginia, that certainly wasn’t enough to keep me from dinner and breakfast there on the way through. Even more conveniently, the Gahanna, OH location was five minutes’ drive around the airport outskirts from my hotel.
• Wandering the northeastern suburbs of Columbus on Friday afternoon, I happened across Allen’s Coins in Westerville. High-quality place, if dangerous to the wallet, as they had all the folders and coin holders even a lazy (if particular) circulation coin collector could ever need. I have yet to find its like in Northern Virginia — perhaps because the rent for a building that size in Fairfax County would be unaffordable for a small business.
• Thumbs-up to local CBS affiliate WBNS for the concept of multicasting all the games — but major thumbs-down for only doing so over digital cable! I rather suspect everyone who’d be particular about not receiving an HD telecast of the featured game already has the full digital HD package, and you could always switch to the single-game HD feed for Ohio State’s games only.
• Speaking of local coverage of Ohio State, sycophantic is about the best I can say for it. Sure, it’s the biggest deal in town, but that doesn’t demand drooling fanboyism — instead, it just made me think less of the program. (Danny-boy, in the highly unlikely event that you’re reading, go back to that last sentence again, and then ponder “Redskins Radio.”)

I had a tough time getting into the second weekend’s games, and it’s been a long time since I was that disinterested in the regional finals. Reason: I’d had a serious rooting interest in the first two rounds for the first time since I was a high-school student idolizing Curtis Staples. I’m sure I’ll be back into the tournament by Saturday, though — the Final Four is, at this point, America’s second-greatest sports spectacle after the Super Bowl.

And next Monday night, after the champion has cut the Georgia Dome nets down and the winning players have started filtering through the voicemails from wannabe NBA agents, CBS will cue up One Shining Moment and run a video montage of the highlights of the tournament, taking care to include at least one shot of every participating team.

That I’ll be recording, because this time, we’ll be in it. And the next time won’t take eleven more years.