One Shining Moment.

The Final Four starts tomorrow, and if you've been anywhere near any sports media, you know that it promises to be a great one. All four teams are very good, and each matchup has plenty of juicy storylines. I'm taking Florida to shut down UCLA again, Georgetown to overpower Ohio State inside, and the Gators to simply be more complete than the Hoyas in the final. It should be a great weekend, topped off by one of the year's great sports days on Monday, when the Royals open the season at home against Boston, followed by the national title game that evening. Good times.

But the real reason for this post is to share one of the greatest blog posts you will ever see. Someone deserves a medal for this. Here are the last ten renditions of One Shining Moment, CBS's annual musical montage that recaps the NCAA tournament. It's overwrought; it's cheesy; it's melodramatic. I love it. The college basketball season is not officially over until the song has played. I feel very strongly about this. I will never, EVER watch How I Met Your Mother because of its cheap promo that parodied this esteemed song. Doogie Howser should be dragged around in the street. Maybe he'll move to Wyoming.

But I digress. Enjoy One Shining Moment, one of the highlights of my sports year.

This is madness!

Sorry, this isn't a 300 review. I've been a little distracted lately by basketball and...uh...stuff, so I haven't gotten to a theater since the Oscars.

My bracket is basically screwed, although I do have three of my Final Four (KU, Georgetown, Florida) left as of this post, along with my national champion (Gators). But my key upsets (Texas, Notre Dame) didn't work out, nor did my "dark horse" Final Four pick (A&M). I also chose the wrong year to take all four 10-seeds and three of the 12s, since none of either seed won. The only decent surprises I predicted were VCU in the first round and Vandy into the Sweet Sixteen. Therefore I'm done in all my pools.

The tournament so far has been solid, even though I did miss much of the best action last weekend for a wedding. But here's the best finish to any game that will happen this year. It's the Division II national championship game. Defending titleist Winona State (in white) has a 57-game winning streak on the line. They led Barton by seven with 45 seconds left; the video picks up with the Warriors at the line, up five, with 35 seconds left. And...play!





Unbelievable.

I hate Billy Packer.

As I've said before, March is the best sports month of the year. There is only one glaring problem with it: the annual resurfacing of Billy Packer. Since he primarily does ACC games during the regular season, I rarely have the misfortune of listening to him until tourney time or a big game late in the year, like yesterday's Duke-Carolina contest. As you can see on the video below, with scant seconds left in the game, Gerald Henderson of Duke (he's the black guy) hammered UNC's star player, Tyler Hansbrough, on a putback attempt. For the five minutes that it took to sort things out, Packer adamanty insisted that Henderson was going after the ball...WHICH WASN'T EVEN ON THE SCREEN WHEN HE SWUNG! Obviously I just gave away my stance on the incident, but I'm willing to listen to someone reasonably try to explain otherwise. Conversely, Packer won't shut up about how Henderson was clearly trying to block the shot, intimidating his too-polite partner Jim Nantz into an awkward silence that screams disagreement, or at least evenhanded-ness. The lesson, as always, is that Billy Packer is an idiot.

As for the foul itself, admittedly, Hansbrough probably shouldn't have been a 12-point game with fifteen seconds left, but that doesn't mean that Duke gets to crush his face. At the very least, Henderson's play was sloppy and irresponsible. Realistically, I think his cheap shot is as dirty a play as one can make in a basketball game, and is more than worthy of any suspension he might get. (I can't believe I'm defending Carolina.)