Monday, December 9, 2024

Unbelievable

Today, the Classic SEC has five of the top nine spots in the AP Men's Basketball Poll:

1.  Tennessee:  8-0
2.  Auburn:  8-1
3.  Iowa St:  7-1
4.  Duke:  7-2
5.  Kentucky:  8-1
6.  Marquette:  9-1
7.  Alabama:  7-2
8.  Gonzaga:  7-2
9.  Florida:  9-0

That's unbelievable -- I never thought I'd see that.

On the other hand, the Classic SEC still hasn't won it all since 2012, or even played for the title since 2014.  So let's not get too excited yet.

8 comments:

  1. UK is ranked number 5 by AP, and is ranked fifth in the Classic SEC by Ken Pom. That's a tough conference.

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  2. I want to make sure I record my experience with the Gonzaga game ...

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  3. My daughter's back home from school, and it's wonderful. One of the ways it's wonderful is that her friends are coming back around the house, and they were over Saturday night to help her put up our Christmas tree.

    We typically decorate our house on the weekend after Thanksgiving, but that weekend was shortened by her needing to return to school early Sunday to get ready for finals--and the fact that the bigger priority now really is getting my wife's parents' house decorated. That's a big, mental-health deal for my mother-in-law, and it took seven of us each working pretty steadily for two or three hours the Saturday after Thanksgiving to get that place to her liking.

    So, anyway, decorating the inside of our house didn't really happen until our daughter was back in town from finals week from WKU, and it finally happened in earnest this past Saturday night with the help of her thanks before we left early Sunday morning for a trip out to Fulton for my wife to visit the Disciples church there and then head on to northern Alabama to visit my brother's family.

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  4. With my wife and the kids occupied with arranging the last stuff I had hauled out of the garage, I snuck to a TV in the back of the house to see what was happening with the Wildcats in Spokane. I turned it on for no more than 30 seconds of late in the first half, and in that time UK fell from behind by, I think, seven to, I think, 11 or 12. And I thought at that point about the pall this loss was going to cast over the HP fun, maybe until as far as February, and I just wasn't willing to bear to think about all of that and flipped it off. As we were getting into bed a couple of hours later, my wife remembered the game and asked me if they might still be finishing out west, and I told her not to worry about it--that UK was getting clobbered when I checked and that the game was long over, anyway. We put on a Newhart, and that was that.

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  5. So the next morning was a total scramble to get to First Christian in Fulton on time for worship at 10. It's a one-hour, 45-minute drive out from Madisonville, and that's if you're hoofing it and they haven't gone down to one lane too much on I-69 and I-24. Furthermore, we were getting stuff battened for an overnight away, and our cat always get hacked off when she sees a suitcase out. The chase is that, when I say it was a total scramble, I mean it was a total scramble, and, when we walked through the beautiful doors of Fulton First Christian's beautiful sanctuary, I mean it was a total scramble. But we made it, and it was terrific to be there. And I had thought zero lick of UK-Gonzaga since my wife had mentioned it the late night before.

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  6. Visiting pastors never quite know what they're in for when they visit a congregation on a Sunday morning. In my wife's formally middle-judicatory position in the culture of our denomination, it's especially delicate to sniff that stuff out in conversations with the locals leading up. And the on-the-ground reality of what actually happens on a Sunday morning is often quite different than what everyone works out on the Wednesday or Thursday or Saturday night beforehand. My wife has learned to just be ready for everything. She wasn't expected to preach a sermon Sunday morning in Fulton, for example, but she had one ready in her pocket--and it stayed there. In fact, things went unusually close to plan in Fulton. She extended greetings from the other Disciples churches across the state whom she serves, and she went over news of what was happening at various congregations and our camp and with other shared ministries. And then, as she typically does, she asked to hear what was going on in the life of the church there and the lives of the congregants on hand.

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  7. I love this whole experience, but I particularly love this part because it's always interesting to hear what bubbles up. It's easy for me to slip into regretting the many years I spent living mostly outside the community of church, but I can usually talk myself through the silliness of that pretty quickly. One gets there, if they get there at all, when one gets there. And by the time I got here, I was freaking ready to be here. Church's regularly pulling me out of my own brain and concerns and choices was the right thing at the right time for me. Still is.

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  8. And so it was during this time of conversation back from the congregation to my wife in the pulpit Sunday morning in Fulton that I learned UK had actually come back--not from the 11 or 12 down that I knew about, but from 18 points--to win at Gonzaga in overtime Saturday night. The fellow who mentioned it was just delighting in the wonder that something so unexpected could happen. I want to be clear that he absolutely wasn't proposing any sort of God-wanted-UK-to-win-and-Gonzaga-to-lose theology; he was just answering, because she asked, that what had been on his brain and heart the last few hours on this second Sunday of Advent was the whole experience of, "Wow, you just never know."

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