Hump

Monday 4/8/24

Four in the morning right now and it's 36 degrees. Later today it's supposed to be 65. This makes me wonder about days where it's been appropriate to use both the heat and the air conditioner.

One might wonder how a person would feel after the physical detailed in these pages over a weekend come Monday morning. I feel pretty much as I always feel. I drank a cup of peppermint tea last night and another this morning for any soreness.

Red Sox beat up on the Angles and returned to Boston for tomorrow's home opener at Fenway. A ten game West Coast road trip to begin the year, and a 7-3 record to show for it. That's good. It's kind of a soft good, given the Athletics, but there's nothing wrong with splitting the series before that and winning the last of them to close out the trip. Ten games in and that was the first game I watched at all. That never happens. The start times had something to do with it.

Watched most of the South Carolina-Iowa game yesterday and the better team definitely won. Iowa got the start they wanted, jumping out to that 10-0 lead, but South Carolina just had too much of a size advantage. At times it was adults against children. Still, Iowa made a push in the fourth, but they couldn't get over the hump. The thing about such a push and a hump is that you get right there, but it takes so much to surmount the ridge. There may have been some luck involved, a call or two goes your way, but then the law of averages begins correcting itself when you last want it to.

Iowa had that travel in the paint, and then the woman missed the open lay-up on that fine feed from Caitlin Clark. But you just can't win a basketball game when the other team is cleaning up on the offensive glass. It's like not being able to stop the run in football even when you know it's coming. You'll lose. It seemed like a rare occurrence the times that South Carolina would have a single shot possession in which they failed to score. They must have put up so many more points than Iowa.

As for Clark--she was okay. I thought that for Iowa to win she needed to have a historic type of performance. Not necessarily in total numbers, but something legendary, sports-wise. The making of key shots again and again. Some heroics. She dribbled the ball off of herself a number of times. She's a very good passer. South Carolina just had a better squad, though. Going undefeated for an entire season isn't that much of a rarity in women's basketball, but obviously that speaks to dominance.