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[Zoey Holmstrom]
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High Arc
Brian • March 21, 2022 • 11:41am

[Shirt? Shirt!]

3/17/2022 – Michigan 75, Colorado State 63 – 18-14, 11-9 Big Ten, Round of 32.
3/19/2022 – Michigan 76, Tennessee 68 – 19-14, 11-9 Big Ten, Sweet 16.

This year played out like a message board hypothetical. You know, the one where a guy posts something like "would you trade a win over OSU and Big Ten championship in football for a disappointing bubble season from the #4 ranked basketball team?" You're like "ehhhhh… okay" because the universe doesn't work like that. And then maybe the universe does work like that.

Perhaps there is a maximum amount of swag to go around and whatever barrels football tapped as they pumped it up this fall came from Michigan's strategic reserve. Or maybe we've got Zavier Simpson in a basement with tubes sprouting from him like so many spring clovers.

I will walk away from this particular Omelas in three weeks, tops. Promise.

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As a person who lives in Ann Arbor and gets asked "what do you do for a living" with some frequency, I have a lot of experience with people being weird or dismissive about sports. Ann Arbor is the archetype of a liberal college town, of course, so anyone who doesn't already know who I am is almost certain to fall on the Sportsball Continuum. On the nice end of this continuum are people who apologize to me for not knowing anything about sports; on the not so nice end are people who actually deploy the world "sportsball." I have had many interactions with people who are puzzled or irritated that I am a guy who does the sports liking.

Sometimes I have tried to explain myself, or at least thought about what I would say if anyone seemed interested in an explanation. (For reasons likely related to cultural ubiquity, Sportsball Continuum people evince a profound lack of interest in why anyone would be off the continuum.) What I've come up with is this: sports aren't just numbers adding up over a set period of time. They are story machines.

One of the great delights of college sports is that the timeframes are generally long enough to see a player become what they're going to become and short enough that there is always someone new to see develop. The pros are more static, with colossi (Brady, Lebron, Baseball Man) bestriding the sport for a decade or more. In college whenever someone hits that they're gone and you've got to see what the freshman with dreadlocks might be up to. The stories are more than Who Is The Goatest, Skip?

These stories exist on various levels: players. Seasons. Programs. This game wrote down some history on all of these levels. It provided the definitive Eli Brooks Game for the longest-serving player in program history. It rewrote this disappointing season, at least somewhat. It reinforced the vibe around Michigan basketball—and unfortunately for Tennessee fans, reinforced the vibe around their program as well. This Jonathan Wilson passage I referenced after the USA-Algeria World Cup game always floats up at times like these:

Perhaps some of the Europeans there – certainly the French journalist opposite – were driven by anti-German feeling, perhaps some were instinctive Slavophiles, but when the three locals at the MTN (South Africa-based mobile telecommunications company) desk reacted to the final whistle with a group hug and collective dance, the appeal of Serbia's inner turmoil becomes difficult to deny. Unless they'd had a bet, I suppose, but when asked one said he'd decided to support Serbia because "they seemed to be trying to lose".

This is an intimately familiar feeling for any basketball fan, but it must be completely unintelligible to the Sportsball Continuum people. Explaining is difficult. Maybe it's less difficult now?

Now I can just say "Imagine that a fifth-year player everyone wanted to run off campus because he seemed terrified of basketball appropriated the delightfully weird shot a previous player—one denied a career culmination by covid—had painstakingly developed over the course of a few years; imagine that this one-time wilting flower of a player would uncork an audacious hook shot at a crucial juncture to defeat a heavily favored opponent, thus writing himself into annals of program history. If you were invested in this sort of thing, watching the maturation and development of this young man would not just be a guy hitting a shot, but the climax of a character arc. It's like Game of Thrones except the source material never runs out. Once you have the context that gives the numbers meaning the drama outstrips any planned fiction. Joy and pathos intermingle. We reach down into the vast beating heart of human striving and drink deeply of its nectar.

"Also sometimes Wisconsin shoots 9% from three."

This would not work because the other person would wander away and talk to someone else about organic hummus brands, but I could do it.

[After THE JUMP: Bullets]
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