Saturday afternoon, I got Daughter up from her nap. I was carrying her to the couch to plop her down next to her grandpa, when I ran my right pinky toe into the solid base of a glider chair we have. As soon as I tried to walk on it, I knew it was broken. Little did I know what it would come to mean.
The last time I broke a toe was March 21, 2002. I was sprinting out of my house on Grant Street in Bloomington after IU beat Duke in the Sweet 16. I was wearing shower sandals, which, in hind sight, are not made for sprinting, and I slipped out of one and rolled over my big toe, breaking it and busting it open in the process. That was the last time IU beat a #1 ranked team. Until Saturday.
Saturday was a big day in sports. Between the Heisman Trophy presentation, the Xavier/Cincinnati brawl, and Ryan Braun's steroid allegations coming to light, the IU/Kentucky game may have gotten lost in the shuffle. The unranked 8-0 Hoosiers welcomed to Assembly Hall the #1 ranked 8-0 Kentucky Wildcats – IU's dirty rival to the south – with a roster full of five-star recruits and a coach who has had to vacate two of his three Final Four appearances due to NCAA violations.
It was a hard-fought game. IU was up ten at points in the second half, but Kentucky came back to take a two-point lead on a free throw with 5.6 seconds left. IU had no timeouts. Christian Watford inbounded the ball to Verdell Jones III, who dribbled up to about the free throw line extended, when he turned around to see a wide-open Watford trailing him behind the three-point line. He passed to Watford who released the ball with about 1 second on the clock. Swish. Pandemonium. This is why college basketball is awesome.
At this point – which was during Daughter's second birthday party, mind you – I went nuts and started screaming hysterically and running around feeling no pain, making several toddlers cry in the process. At Assembly Hall, Tom Crean had a look of disbelief, as fans rushed the court (which, while technically not allowed under my rules of court rushing, I allowed it in this situation). At a jam-packed Nick's English Hut (probably the greatest college bar in the world), this was the scene:
IU Upsets KY - Celebration at Nick's English Hut from Tarun Gangwani on Vimeo.
Forgive us if we seem a little giddy. If this were any year prior to 2009, beating Kentucky when they were ranked #1 would have been a big win, but it wouldn't have meant nearly as much as it meant Saturday.
As you may or may not recall, IU's basketball program was decimated in 2008. Before then, IU had a squeaky clean reputation, playing by the rules without any major NCAA violations since before Bob Knight arrived. After Kelvin Sampson got busted for sending too many text messages for the second time (by the way, there are now no limits on the number of text messages coaches can send to recruits – thanks NCAA) and then lied about it, and then got fired, and then IU limped to an 8-seed in the NCAA tournament and a first-round loss, and then several players got kicked off the team, and then several players transferred, IU was left with two returning players, both walk-ons, who had played a combined total of 11 minutes. To top it off, several top recruits decommitted and went to other schools. When Tom Crean was hired, he wasn't rebuilding a program; he was building a program from scratch.
When you're a proud and storied program like IU, and you've suffered through a 28-66 record over the last three years, you're eagerly waiting to get over that hump and get back to national prominence. The win over Kentucky put IU back on the basketball map. The Hoosiers are back in the Top 25 for the first time since March 2008 and are 9-0 for the first time since the 1989-1990 season. As an IU student or fan, there is nothing better than when IU basketball is winning (especially when you're at Assembly Hall or a bar with IU fans for a game), and it means even that much more given what the program has been through over the past few years. I will gladly sacrifice a toe here and there if this is the result.
For some other YouTube clips (all sent to me by Holt), click on these:
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