Final 4!!!!

Annnnnnd exhale. I guess I didn't expect it to be easy, but c'mon. If that shot goes in yesterday, I am in my car and halfway to Mexico by now. That might have been it for me. As it stands, we play arguably our worst game of the year (except for Sasha Kaun, he lived up to Lane's hype for the one of the few times this year. Be proud of your boy, Lane) and still advance to the Final 4. It was a gut-wrenching couple of hours, that's for sure. You could tell about 3 possessions in that we were gonna have one of those games where we almost seem like we're begging to lose. Let's hope we got that out of our system before next weekend.

We headed downtown a few hours before the game, to assure ourselves of a prime spot at Harbour Lights. I was starting to have some bad premonitions, the more people we talked to personally, and the more conversations we overheard. There was a lot of looking ahead to playing Carolina going on, like we had already beaten Davidson. I was guilty of this as well. Our whole reasoning for going downtown was so that we could join in the celebration afterwards. But things turned out OK, and the celebration afterwards was one of the greatest experiences of my life. Just an indescribable blur of hugging strangers, high-fiving people in cars as they pass by (until the amount of people in the streets completely shut traffic down), and yelling and cheering. I even crowd-surfed for the first time since the Sugar Ray concert/drinking debacle. Was that freshman year?

As we marched up and down Massachusetts street, Kyle and I did a fantastic job of running into a bar, buying giant beers, chugging them down 1/3 of the way, jamming them in our pockets and peg-legging it back to the street. Actually, I should say I did a good job of that; Kyle is probably still wringing beer out of his pants right now.



I gotta say, I don't understand the bracket standings. I had 7 of the Elite 8 teams correct, and all the Final 4 teams correct (I took a lot of shit from everyone telling me that all four 1 seeds couldn't do it; I told you they were the best four teams almost a year ago***) and yet there are three people ahead of me, all of whom had less of the Elite 8 teams and less of the Final 4 teams correct. How am I not in the lead? I guess I don't really care, though, if I end up winning, that means that KU didn't. So screw it.

I'm not even going to mention the matchup with He Who Must Not Be Named and North Carolina in the semifinals. Not yet. I'm not even close to being emotionally ready for that. For now I'm going to just enjoy the taste of Final 4 in my mouth right now. In case you're wondering, it tastes like a combination of day-old keg beer and coughed-up lung tissue, and it couldn't be more delicious. Days like yesterday are the reason I moved down here. Rock Chalk.

Me, Lane, Kyle, Kyle's mullet, and Jud. I had that same goofy grin on my face for about two and a half hours straight. Not pictured: the girl who got hit by a car sometime during all the chaos. What an idiot.

***That was my Memphis Tigers "We don't get any respect" impression. You suck, John Calipari.