Rushing the Court

For the final game of the regular season for the Nittany Lions basketball team, I was cautiously optimistic that they could at least keep it close against the #17 Indiana Hoosiers, largely because the game was at home at the BJC (and Penn State almost always rolls over and plays dead on the road). So I went to the game Kent, Grabon and one of his friends yesterday, but still not honestly thinking that we would win. Also, the atmosphere was kinda dead for the first half, because it was spring break and so not many students showed up (there was no student section for this game, and what’s normally the student section was actually filled with mostly Hoosier fans, blah). And PSU was without their two best players, Geary Claxton (who tore up his knee back in mid-January) and Jamelle Cornley (who finally succumbed to the pain of his injured knee that he’s played on all season, and is getting it scoped today), so it was mostly up to our freshmen to see what they could do. And they played a pretty decent first half, taking a 31-30 lead over Indiana into the locker room. They extended that to a 36-30 lead early in the second before Eric Gordon and the Hoosiers went on a 14-0 run to go up 44-36. At that point we all thought the Nittany Lions were done, because they’ve had these prolonged scoring droughts too many times this season. But they started battling back, which really got the fans into the game, and eventually tied the game at 58-58 with 23 seconds left, forcing overtime. It was a pretty tense overtime, but the Lions did just enough, and made enough free throws at the right time (their poor free throw shooting still almost cost them the game though), and Penn State sealed the 68-64 upset of highly touted Indiana. So of course we all rushed the court, since we’d just beaten another top-25 team, won our 5th home Big Ten game in a row to close out the regular season, and did it without our two best players. (Ben took the picture above on the left from the upper deck of the fans rushing the court, you can see me kinda in the middle of the picture, on the edge of the crowd, wearing a white shirt, blue hat and waving a white shaker, just above the guy in the orange jacket. Thanks Ben!) PSU basketball looks to be in pretty good shape for the next few years, and on the path back to respectability! But that was the first time I’d rushed the court since I was at Gustavus, when we’d rush the floor to celebrate last-second conference playoff wins (68-67 over Bethel in 2003 comes to mind!), clinching NCAA Division III tournament berths (all four years I was there!), and NCAA tournament wins (including when we clinched a berth into the Final Four in 2003, heck yeah!). Ahh, those were the days… This was definitely the first time I’ve rushed the court to celebrate my team finishing the regular season at .500 overall, haha.
Oh, and I signed a lease for an apartment for next year back on Thursday morning. I’ll be living with Tim starting in early August in Imperial Towers. Sure, it’s not quite as nice as a couple other places we looked at, but it’s still got a decent kitchen (if a bit small, but what apartment’s kitchen isn’t smallish?), big living room, a balcony (3rd floor corner unit) and two bathrooms, it’s still walkable to campus (only a couple minutes further than my walk is currently, actually), and saving $100-200/month per person is a very good thing. I’ll even be saving about $30/month from what I’m paying for my current place too (hooray for no confiscatory parking rates at Imperial Towers!). I figure that with the money I’ll save next year over choosing one of the other nicer places we looked at, I can pay for my plane ticket to Australia next year just with that. 🙂
With it being spring break, I’ve definitely taken it easy this weekend. I really needed a break to recharge my batteries a bit, I was really starting to get worn down. Other than playing piano in church this Sunday and going to the basketball game yesterday, I stayed in the whole weekend, putzing around with some work on the PSCG webpage and my online photo albums (I might actually get my Arizona pics up this week, from my spring break trip two years ago, haha). Eventually I’ll catch up. And eventually I’ll upload my movies to YouTube and post them on my movies page, because I don’t have much space left on my webserver.
But anyway, even though it’s still spring break, I still need to catch up on some actual work, so that’s what I’m gonna do now. Off to Walker I go. Hopefully I can get past my coding block and finish up a couple programs I need for my research. Oh, and the drinking water restriction on campus was lifted on Friday afternoon. Now I don’t have to be dehydrated at work anymore, hooray!