Black socks in the hour of chaos

Contrast I watched ESPN’s Fab 5 Documentary the night before I left for vacation and very much enjoyed it, lamenting the fact that I wouldn’t have time to weigh in on Jalen Rose’s comments about Duke. Considering the instant-gratification Twitter-borne sports culture we live in, I assumed that by the time I got back a week later, it would be a non-issue.

It was to my surprise when I got back that it was even more a topic than it had been before I left. I still need a late pass, since the approaching baseball season has sucked up a lot of my time since then, but it’s still on my mind.

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Senior moment: Parting ways with Nolan and Singler

Black/white Kobe Vs: A good look Four years ago, following Duke basketball’s weakest season since I enrolled there in 1997, my dad and I got really excited about the potential of the team’s incoming freshman class.

In late 2007, right after my second marathon, my dad — who isn’t really a sports fan, but got into Duke basketball when I started there — surprised me with Beckett-graded basketball cards he had won on eBay of Nolan Smith, Kyle Singler and Taylor King in McDonald’s All-American jerseys. We arranged the cards under the glass of my coffee table with some other Duke cards we’ve collected over the years, a sort of makeshift micro-Hall of Fame.

And we began to follow their careers together.

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Masterpiece theater: National title is greatness as usual for Hurley

Watching I’ll never forget this: Back in 2002, my first year home from college, I had this running route I liked that took me through six towns in North Jersey. That winter, on one of those runs, I passed a mid-60’s gentleman in a St. Anthony’s varsity jacket, and I stopped to talk to him.

The man told me that though he hadn’t attended St. Anthony’s, he had become a fan of their style of play over the years. He described how it was crisper and more precise than anyone else’s. He said he tried to make it to as many games as he could, and I vowed to him I’d check it out sometime.

At that time, basically all I knew about St. Anthony’s was Bobby Hurley had gone there, and his dad coached there. And I didn’t know a thing about Bob other than he was Bobby’s father.

Obviously, I had a lot to learn.

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