"Resilience"

Betsy B I've posted a lot in the past few days. Holler at me, ya'll. What up.

This post was supposed to be my "State of the Union", my evaluation on how we've done as a team up until the Series, and my diagnosis going into it. I had this great 2010 Illini Men's Basketball team juxtaposition worked out, as well as a comparison to The Office's shift in focus from Jim&Pam to Erin & Andy and Dwight and his baby mothers, but when I read this article, I realized that it says all I really wanted to say.

Admittedly, I'm not a huge Oklahoma fan. I check up on them every once in a while because AT's on the team. If they're on TV, I'll stop to watch but other than that I don't really go out of my way to watch a Sooner game the way I do for UConn games. I've always admired Sherri Coale and the Sooners since 2002, when they had that sick team with Stacey Dales and Rosalind Ross and LaNeishea Caufield, and I've been rooting for them since AT started playing for them, but other than that they're not really always on my radar. Whitney Hand was the first "big name" player this season to go down with an ACL tear and I remember thinking to myself: Yikes. I knew they had lost a couple girls to transfers and their roster was looking thin. And then I stopped thinking about them. Lost to UConn in the regular season? Oh. Didn't win the Big 12 Championship? Oh. But then they got to the NCAA tourney. And they kept winning. And their girls kept fighting.

I remember how SICK this team was last year with D-Rob and the Paris twins. I thought for sure they were going to be UConn's competition in the final game. But they lost the Paris twins. Who could recover from losing a completely dominant player like CP? Like I said before, no one expected Oklahoma to be as good as they were this year, and no one expected them to get as far as they did. They challenged Stanford up until the closing moments of the semifinal game, and they never gave up -- not in that game and not in their season.

We need to take a page out of Oklahoma's book. We lost a lot, but that shouldn't dampen our spirits and it shouldn't dampen our expectations. Play like you're playing for a National Championship. NEVER settle for anything less. Boomer Sooner? (Aaaaaaand Sameer has officially disowned me as a friend.)