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February 18, 2009
Defense Lives Here???
And I thought the Wisconsin @ Penn State game I went to with Ben a week and a half ago was perhaps the most excruciatingly painful basketball game I'd ever watched, when the BadgerBadgerBadgers walked out of Happy Valley with a disgusting 54-44 win. Penn State shot a pathetic 0-for-14 from three-point land. Ugh.
That game has been replaced in my pantheon of most painful games ever to watch.
When Kent & I drove back from our IM basketball game tonight, we turned on the radio, and they said the score was Penn State 17-15 Illinois -- at HALFTIME. Yuck. Both teams had round-trip tickets on the struggle bus tonight. I watched most of the second half on TV at home, and I thought it was pretty much over when #16 Illinois "jumped" out to a 29-20 lead halfway through the second half (at that point, the Fighting Illini were on a 16-3 "run" over a 13-minute span). And then the Nittany Lions came alive. Well, sort of. In the final 10 minutes they pulled themselves off the mat and responded to Illinois' 16-3 run with an 18-4 run of their own to close out the game. That's right, the final score was Penn State 38-33 Illinois. 38 to 33. I'll let that sink in for a bit.
38 to 33.
And no, this wasn't a girls' high school basketball game. It was beautiful Big Ten basketball at its finest. It was the lowest-scoring men's basketball game in NCAA Division I since December 2005, when Monmouth beat Princeton in a 41-21 snoozefest. Umm, yeah...
But hey, a win's a win. Especially over a top-20 team on the road (incidentally, it's also the third win in a row for Penn State at Illinois, the first time PSU has ever won three consecutive games at a Big Ten road venue). And this win was absolutely HUGE for Penn State, as they're scratching and clawing to try to earn an invitation to the NCAA Tournament. Last time I checked there wasn't a requirement for a team to score 40 points for it to be counted as a win. This game may have set basketball back several decades. And I'm pretty sure this game was the basketball equivalent of the infamous 6-4 game (in the 2004 football season, Iowa defeated Penn State 6-4 here in Happy Valley... I remember seeing that box score while I was in Australia and shuddering in horrified amazement). It may not have been pretty tonight, but I'll take it! WE ARE... PENN STATE!
Posted by Jared at February 18, 2009 10:41 PM