March Madness Update

The #6 seeded Duke Men's Basketball team lost to #11 Virginia Commonwealth in the 1st round of the NCAA Tournament this year (79-77). Duke had made 9 straight Sweet 16 appearances, and had 10 consecutive first rounds victories. Interestingly, Greg Paulus scored a career-high 25 points, and Josh McRoberts added a career-high 22 points and had 12 rebounds. Major problem: Duke went 20-32 from the foul line. I've archived the game notes for future analysis. Link

The good news is that the Women's Basketball team received the top overall #1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. With a loss to NC State in the ACC Semifinals, the team certainly looked back on track last night with a 81-44 win over Holy Cross. The game was memorable for one of the Holy Cross Seniors, Brittany Keil. Entering the game with 993 points, she had scored only 4 minutes in the first 39 minutes of play. Timeout Holy Cross. They inbound the ball, and after a few passes, Keil gets the ball drains the 3 point basket. Granted our defense left her pretty well open, but a 20 foot shot isn't exactly a 'gimmie' (basketball or golf).

Here's what Holy Cross coach Bill Gibbons had to say about Duke and Coach Gail Goestenkors:
"I always have respect for Gail, but today it grew ten-fold. I am rooting for Duke to win it all because of the class they showed."

I concur. This game will fade from our memories, but I thought it was important to document it. Certainly, it was a big day for that senior.

I was a recipient of the Holy Cross Book Award in 2001

Duke 67 - St. John's 50

It has been over a month since my last post, but that isn’t an accurate reflection on the rate of adventure. In fact, these past few weeks have been exciting, and I can only begin to summarize. One trip stands out in my mind, being the journey to New York City to watch Duke Men’s Basketball vs. St. John's in Madison Square Garden. The trip was nonstop, and I did want to mention it was unfortunate that I couldn’t meet up with my sister who also happened to be in town on Sunday.

The itinerary included driving up with Vito, Jeff, and Kristen to Philadelphia to stay at Eric’s place. The next day we took the train. I met Jeff and Liz for a tour of the American Museum of Natural History. I enjoyed that a great deal. There’s so much information there it can be overwhelming.

A remarkable small world story was that we ran into another group of students from our department in Penn Station. We each had an independent travel schedule, but managed to run into them just after getting off our train. This was marginally more significant for them because we were the only people they knew in the City. Personally, that’s what I like most about New York: Even though there are more than 8 million people living in NYC, it’s fairly common to cross paths with people you know.

I met up with Lauren and Leah from high school to celebrate Lauren’s birthday. She also went to the game with us. I think Leah may have said it best in commenting that we would have never expected the reunion if it was predicted back in 2001.

Mathematically speaking, this reunion phenomenon is similar to the small world phenomenon. The probability of a particular reunion event on a given day is low, but integrating all the possibilities over a time period of years has a tendency to make the unlikely a reality.

See also: The Serendipity article on Wikipedia describes many life changing inventions such as Penicillin and Post-It Notes.

Duke Basketball

The men’s game against UNC in Cameron was really exciting. My dad came down for the game and we had a fun time. Unfortunately Duke lost, but the game was close the whole way. The following day the #1 ranked women’s team beat #2 ranked UNC at Carolina. Each with records of 24-0, this was a great match.

Unfortunately, the men’s UNC loss was just one in our current 4 game loosing streak. For the first time since 1996, the team is not in the top 25. Dare I say, we’ve become a bubble team? If we don’t start winning we’ll be watching the NCAA tournament on television.