The Virginia Cavaliers looked like everything was going right for them.\u00a0 The team that had knocked them off the last two tournaments was upset in the first round.\u00a0\u00a0 The other top 10 school that was only 1 1\/2 hours away from the Chicago regional semi-finals\/finals also got upset in the first round.\u00a0\u00a0 And the top seeded Cavaliers had beaten Butler and Iowa State to get to the final, where they would face a team they beat earlier in the season to get to the Final Four.<\/p>\n
Then, they jumped out to a 14 point lead on the Syracuse Orange – which they then held onto going into the last final 10 minutes.\u00a0 They had cut the lead to 9 points at the 8 minute TV timeout, as Charlie and I watched on my computer so Katie could watch Henry Danger on TV.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I thought to myself that I would take the break to use the bathroom and watch the last 5 minutes before taking the kids to bed.\u00a0\u00a0 And when I came back into the room, Charlie says, “Guess what, Dad?\u00a0\u00a0 Syracuse is winning!”\u00a0 Sure enough, as I get back to my computer, I see that while I was gone, the Orange had gone on a 12-2 run to take a 59-58 lead (apparently led by some great play by Malachi Richardson).\u00a0\u00a0 My wife looks up in surprise and says we should put it on the big TV, much to Katie’s chagrin.\u00a0 And we all watched as Syracuse continued stopping Virginia every single time down the court to finish up with an amazing 68-62 victory.<\/p>\n
I was actually glad it was time to take the kids up to bed, because I had no clue of what to write in the blog.\u00a0 As many know, Syracuse is not one of my favorite teams.\u00a0\u00a0 I very loudly screamed that Syracuse shouldn’t be in the tournament with all their losses in the ACC.\u00a0\u00a0 And yet, hear the Orange are, cutting down the nets in Chicago and getting ready to the Final Four.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They definitely proved me wrong – they proved everyone wrong (tell me how many people outside of Syracuse fans picked the Orange to get this far).\u00a0 But in this crazy tournament, this of course make sense.\u00a0\u00a0 Here we had one of the top teams in the country with a 14 point lead with under 10 minutes to play against a double digit seed.\u00a0 And so of course, the double digit seed would go on to outscore the #1 seed 31-11 for the remainder of the game.\u00a0\u00a0 No lead has been safe in this tournament, and painfully, for the Virginia Cavaliers, heartache would hit them this Easter Sunday, as they went unbelievably cold at one of the most important moments of its season.<\/p>\n
So, now, after all 4 #1 seeds made it to the Elite 8, we have only one remaining.\u00a0\u00a0 And I feel bad for them.\u00a0\u00a0 That is because, the North Carolina Tar Heels now enter this game as the favorite to win the tournament.\u00a0 And this tournament has not been kind to favorites.\u00a0\u00a0 The Lunatic Curse has been in rare form this week, as I have watched in pain as I have gone from in the lead to tied for 200th as Miami FL, Texas A&M, Duke, Oregon and Kansas all have lost.\u00a0\u00a0 And so the only remaining team that can score points for the Lunatic is of course – the North Carolina Tar\u00a0Heels.\u00a0 And if that isn’t bad enough, their opponent is the Notre Dame Fighting Irish – a team they lost to on the road in the regular season (before destroying them in the ACC tournament).\u00a0\u00a0 All the Irish have done is come back from being down 12 at half against Michigan, come back from being 5 down with 1 1\/2 minutes left to get a last second tip-in basket by a player who typically averages 2 points per game to beat Stephen F Austin, and then stole the ball twice in the last 28 seconds after being down 3 to come back and beat the Badgers.<\/p>\n
So, all the Tar Heels have riding against them is the Lunatic Curse, the pressure of being the last remaining #1 seed, the pressure of beating a team that they are expected to beat convincingly because of what they did in the ACC tournament, and of course that opponent is the Fighting Irish – one of the teams that the Lunatic is not allowed to root for on pure principle of being a Boilermaker.\u00a0 That same Fighting Irish team that has needed to comeback in amazing fashion in all three games to just get the chance to play the Tar Heels.\u00a0\u00a0 And the Tar Heels will take a 5 point lead into the second half – which means the stage is now completely set for what the Lunatic has watched all weekend.\u00a0\u00a0 Notre Dame has the #1 seed right where they want them – and so I feel bad for North Carolina – I hope my curse doesn’t knock them out as well as everyone else I have rooted for this weekend (especially when they were nice enough to take out the Hoosiers).\u00a0\u00a0 Good luck, Tar Heels.\u00a0 With everything against you, you will need it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Virginia Cavaliers looked like everything was going right for them.\u00a0 The team that had knocked them off the last two tournaments was upset in the first round.\u00a0\u00a0 The other top 10 school that was only 1 1\/2 hours away from the Chicago regional semi-finals\/finals also got upset in the first round.\u00a0\u00a0 And the top […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=941"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":942,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions\/942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}