Monday flat-out sucked. And I wouldn’t trade it. This is
not some half-hearted consolation about how it was a good season
and we shouldn’t think about the disappointing ending. That
might be a good idea for some, but not me, not yet. I’m not
ready for that.
Everyone wanted a national title. Looking up in Pauley Pavilion
you could see a perfect place for the 2006 national title banner.
It’s not coming, and no one gets their money back.
The truth is there shouldn’t be a refund. If the team gets
ousted in the first round of the tournament, you turn your head and
count down the days to baseball season. If they go out in the Sweet
16 or even the Elite Eight there is always too much distance
between them and a title to make any talk of it anything but
ridiculous speculation. Once you make the Final Four, and
especially the title game, you’ve paid your money.
You’ve gotten on the roller coaster and you take what you get
on national television.
The championship game was a left hook right to the face. You can
lower your head in defeat with consolation talk, or you can take it
and look your opponent right back in the eyes. The amazing comeback
against Gonzaga was ours. The outstanding beating of LSU was ours.
So was this one.
There was talk about some bad officiating but the truth of the
matter is we didn’t get cheated, we got beat. Florida hit a
ridiculous percentage of its shots and had answers on both sides of
the ball. Whether you hate the Gators or really hate the Gators,
they deserved the title.
Fans should plan on wearing this one. All of the talk before the
game was about how everyone will remember this game for the rest of
their lives. The excitement was incredible. The inflatable Gator
stuffed into the Bruin Bear’s mouth was an example of how
amped the campus was. Bruins won’t forget being on that big
of a stage, even (and almost especially) after being let down.
Anytime you lose a national title game the memories don’t
fade quickly. In 20 years I’ll be telling stories about
hopping around in line to get a good seat in Pauley to watch the
game.
So where do we go from here?
“The biggest thing when you get beat and you lose a game,
especially a game of this magnitude for the national championship,
but any game, it’s learning from and responding to defeat,
disappointment,” coach Ben Howland said. “How you
respond to that means everything.”
The response to this should be ownership. All of the talk before
the game was about history and what the four letters on the front
of the Bruins’ jerseys meant. All of the talk after the game
should be about the same thing. For the student body this is a big
chapter in their time at UCLA.
No one likes losing. Especially not like that. But sports
consolations are filled with more clichés than sports
interviews. “There’s always next year,”
“You can’t win “˜em all,” and “we had
a good run” can be heard on 64 of the 65 teams’
campuses that made the tournament this year. There comes a point
when the words mean absolutely nothing. Next year has its time and
place, next year.
People itching for a run to next year’s title game wonder
about who will stick around to make it. While that’s true,
asking Farmar if he’s going to stick around is like a teenage
boy asking a girl after a date if it’s normal, and does it
happen to every guy. It’s just the wrong question at the
wrong time, that seems to get asked every time. Farmar’s
spirit will show. If he wants that title badly enough, he’ll
be back.
For everyone else the wound will heal, and that can happen with
our eyes open and heads held high.
Email Gordon at
[email protected] if it’s too early for
consolation.