Dear World: Take this. Love, us.
First: Florida wins its first national title in basketball with a not-even-funny-haha braining of UCLA. Obligatory posting of cliched celebration song in 3..2..1...
Who says victory doesn't wear a two tone body suit? And have half a mike stand that it doesn't quite know what to do with? Freddie's outfit in the video actually bears a strong resemblance to what we wear to Gator games every Saturday in the fall; just replace thewhite and black with orange and blue and put about eight balled up socks in the crotch and you've got the picture, which you may now run screaming from the computer upon seeing.
Welcome back! Now that you've hopefully scrubbed that image from your brain with some steel wool or a couple of brimming glasses of Windex, the question from reader Miguel asks:
can you post and let us try to explain how this (non-football) title feels like?
i'm very confused.
like my daughter turning out gay but marrying Angelina Jolie?
Miguel's on the right track here with the Jolie metaphor. We don't know if we can put it better, really, since our interest level in basketball compares favorably to our interest in the ESPN Outdoor Games. (Except for the hot saw competition, which matches up log versus man holding chainsaw powered by a snowmobile engine. That's still completely badass. The dogs jumping off the dock for distance aren't bad, either, though one of these days we'd love to see a mastiff just try to compete. It'd be a big step forward for...um...mastiffs.)
Someone clearly needs to break the mastiff barrier in competitive dog jumping.
How does this feel? Well, if you're a solid brander--the kind of collegiate sports fan who's all about the uni, the uni, and no one else but the uni, then you're in heaven right now since your uni just walked away with a national title in b-ball. And we do mean walked, since every time UCLA came close the Gators did something to humiliate them and put them back to a 12-point deficit: hitting threes, blocking shots, or dunking, as Noah did, with 1:08 left on the clock just to put some stank on it.
These people are the ones we saw in Atlanta last weekend at the NCAA Swimming and Diving championships at Georgia Tech. People from Auburn drove their RVs in and tailgated like it was a football game. We saw at least two of them, massive, half a million dollar beasts swimming around the parking lots futilely searching for somewhere to park without getting ticketed. The branders and the booster class are thrilled about any national championship, be it in curling, lacrosse, wrestling, or even the obscure but exciting sport of bas-ket-ball, which involves taking genetic mutants, giving them baggy shorts, and asking them to put a ball in a hoop placed ridiculously far off the ground without the benefit of trampolines.
As a non-brander and a football fan who attended one b-ball game in their entire term as an undergraduate at the University of Florida this feels...not bad. (That game featured Dimitri Hill, who capped the evening by eating Lon Kruger's left arm. This qualified as "restraint" for the man known as "The Meat Hook.") Like when your wife insists on doing something girly for you, like buying you a manicure or insisting that you use soap when you bathe. It's pleasant enough. But as far as satisfying the bunker-dwelling beast of football lust in your soul, it's like any of the following.
--a hand job when you need sex.
--Cheez-puffs when you need Chee-tos (Hi Phil!)
--Rutgers versus West Virginia in local coverage when Texas/Oklahoma is on. (Actually happened in 2005 on ABC in the 404. May God damn you all.)
--Miller Lite when you could use a martini
--Allowing your niece or nephew to pick a song on the radio, landing on "S.O.S." by Rhianna, and finding yourself singing along with a three year-old and a toss-off British pop star.
It's a substitute, but it'll do for the moment. The sickest thing of all is that we, fresh off a national championship in basketball, have already moved on mentally to the Orange and Blue game at the end of the month, a sure sign of illness if we've ever heard it. Sincerely: we're more excited about a scrimmage involving players from the same team than we are about this national championship. We'll be over here in the corner talking to this figurine of Danny Wuerffel if you need us. That's right, Danny...we don't need them...just you and me and the fade to the endzone...ahhh precious....
Nobody says the offseason is pretty. It certainly isn't for Orson.
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