In praise of too much sport
The hockey game made me think of Kemba Walker, and that's why I'm broken
Thursday night/Friday morning, the Florida Panthers and Carolina Hurricanes played a hockey game deep into the recesses of the night. If you were normal and well-adjusted, you were both in bed by the time Matthew Tkachuk netted the game-winner and deeply unconcerned about What It All Meant, aside from the fact that another South Florida professional sports team was running amok over a much higher-seeded team with a spot in the championship at stake.
Mostly, I remembered Eric Devendorf.
One of my most formidable sporting memories is of a contest I didn’t even see in regulation beyond the last few minutes and scarcely cared about even when seeing it on that night’s dance card, until it turned into the battle of wills I will measure every game by for likely the rest of my natural-born life.
March 12, 2009. Syracuse 127, UConn 117 in six overtimes at Madison Square Garden in the Big East Tournament Quarterfinals. Here’s the entire game, before YouTube takes it down.
Somehow or another, that had been a College Night at the Nashville Predators game—my then-girlfriend and now-wife had accompanied me from Clarksville for cheap nosebleed seats and domestic beer and, because we were the kind of poor that only college-aged kids can fathom, we eschewed the bar scene on Broadway and requisite cover charges to return to Clarksville and more pilsner-shaped serenity at my fraternity house BECAUSE I KNOW HOW TO CHARM A LADY.
I do not remember the details of what was happening when we came in, only that we had beer and saw a few people crowded around a television watching basketball, a habit that I (obviously) haven’t kicked to this day. We watched as Devendorf hit what he thought was the game-winner, only to have it waved off by officials in what was still the early days of instant replay, when all shots at the end of the half were reviewable, and was deemed a hair late.