Farewell to the Cardinals

The Louisville Cardinals have had many great basketball teams in their long and proud history, and they've had better teams than the one we saw tonight, but they've never had a team that played harder than this one. When I saw Louisville at the beginning of the year, I couldn't understand why Cardinal fans were so optimistic -- I didn't think they had enough offensive firepower to go deep into the tournament. And I still think they may be the worst offensive team I've ever seen reach the Final Four. But man, do they play hard.

When he was at Kentucky, Coach Pitino always told us that his teams would be better-conditioned than their opponents, that they would try to wear them down, and that they would never give up. He has rarely had any team -- either at UK or at U of L -- who bought into that philosophy more than this one did. They fought, and fought, and fought -- and then fought some more. They can legitimately tell themselves that the only reason they lost tonight was because in Anthony Davis, they ran into the type of talent that one almost never sees in college basketball.

The Cardinals finish the season 30-10. They were the Big East Tournament Champions, they won the West Region of the NCAA Tournament, they garnered the most national publicity for the program of any Cardinal team since 1986, and my guess is that they will be remembered very fondly by the Louisville fan base.

The Cardinals are the fifth of the six teams in the Commonwealth to be eliminated from this year's battle for the NCAA basketball championship. The Commonwealth still has one team left.