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!