3/30/2021 – Michigan 49, UCLA 51 – 23-5, 14-3 B10, Season Over

This is absolutely projecting my feelings onto a sporting event determined by a lot of coinflips that went the wrong way, but in the end it felt like the weight got to them.

A year of empty arenas and COVID tests. A perpetual uncertainty about what games would even be played. A three-week break in the middle of the season where they couldn't even practice together. A captain lost on the eve of the tournament. Juwan Howard losing his mentor to COVID. A fanbase that just needs something to remind them why they're a fanbase at all.

pic.twitter.com/GR1t4msjeZ

— MichiganCFBRisk (@cfb_risk) March 30, 2021

All college basketball teams played under a weight this year, of course, but Michigan's was amongst the heaviest. They soldiered through it better than anyone not named Gonzaga. They demolished the Big Ten, until things started to come undone.

The thing about carrying a weight is that you can do it without looking burdened for a while, and then you slow down some. Then maybe you have a second wind, and then you're staring at it on the ground wondering how you ever picked it up in the first place. Michigan's weary bones tried to get a ball all the way to the basket late in this game and just could not.

After every fateful miss I exhaled a little bit more, resigned. Not angry, just succumbing to the inevitable. Hunter Dickinson and Mike Smith missed five consecutive free throws, Franz Wagner went 1/10, and Michigan shot 13/25 at the rim. What can you do? Sometimes you want your arm to do a thing and it says no.

[After THE JUMP: attack of the killer ants!]

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I mentioned that I hit a wall during the pandemic and found myself at a point where two roads diverged.

Before that, for months on end I found the whole buttoned-up world soothing. I pulled clover out of our neglected backyard, and moved mulch, and bought great piles of stone to move about. Then there was more clover to pull. I dug up all the loose pavers in the backyard and re-seated them. I could go nowhere else—then even the playgrounds were closed—and found that I felt like I didn't really need to.

The kids plucked wild strawberries out of the weeds I was pulling and offered some of them to me. I usually turned them down. The little berries are seedy and sour, but sometimes my daughter would absolutely insist and I would relent. When you are two and you have been told you must share everything all the time, sometimes "no" is not an acceptable answer when you're actually doing the thing everyone says you must. They had no reservations about the berries. They powered through them avidly, the delight of harvest blowing their usual reticence to eat anything unfamiliar out of the water. Bea Arthur Cook would exclaim "I found one!" whenever she found one.

When I was tired I would sit under the shade of one of the trees at the back of the yard and close my eyes. Occasionally I'd lay down, a temporary situation when you've trained your children to believe that a prone father is the world's best trampoline. In the moments before I received a preschooler's atomic drop I felt the wind and looked up at the sky through an irregular canopy of leaves.

Denard Robinson Cook made a habit of flipping over those pavers to see if he could find an "ant colomy," which he often did.

i have convinced my son the most appropriate noun for any situation is "bad boy".
EG: "can we lift this bad boy to see if there are any ants?"

— mgoblog (@mgoblog) June 21, 2020

The ants would scatter and I'd tell him not to touch any of them. Once we found a giant number of ovoid, sickly translucent eggs being tended to. Upon being exposed to the light, the ants tending them burst into activity. In a couple minutes the eggs had been transported out of sight.

Then they started biting us. The time that it took to scurry the eggs out of sight exactly corresponded to the amount of time it took another group of ants to migrate out from the nest and find us, two feet away.

Bites from your common backyard American ant are strange. The first one feels like a little spike of pain that may be the kind of incidental thing that occasionally happens for no reason when you are 40. The second one starts you wondering, and then you realize you're under attack. DRC and BAC started howling as we retreated to the house; leaving the scene of the crime did not stop the little flares of pain because by that point they'd infiltrated our clothing. Once inside I took their clothes off, searching for the irate little bastards and taking their kamikaze lives. They were still biting me, of course. After a couple of minutes the kids were near-nude and sad. Every once in a while I'd get a flare of pain at a random spot on my body and slap it in case I could prevent a recurrence. We made quite a trio, sitting on the floor just inside the door, some of us weeping, some of us muttering under our breath about what a bad idea evolution was.

You may think this was a bad thing that happened. It was. But also it was a thing, that happened. Then it got cold and nothing happened. Or not enough, anyway.

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Into this void stepped the halting restoration of sports. Specifically, the donkey sport. Michigan football succeeded only in deepening the Black Pit Of Negative Expectations that immediately followed the Minnesota game, and then farted through a 2-4 season whose only virtue was that half of it was mercifully canceled. The guys who were supposedly neck and neck to be the first great Harbaugh quarterback have both transferred, and when we dutifully put up roster news about the football program people are increasingly furious:

Please stop with football content, nobody cares. Please more women's Basketball coverage instead

— Poofas_JR (@PoofasJ) March 30, 2021

This did not count as something happening except in the ants-are-biting-us way, and to be perfectly honest I preferred the ants. The ants did not last four hours and have incessant Buick commercials. I did not have to write about the ants. I chose to write about the ants.

Then, this team. Gradually. Hints of promise in MAC blowouts, but that Oakland game. They won by four at Penn State and were sort of in a game against Nebraska late. Mike Smith was still the Columbia transfer with the hair and not the scrappy guy who hits stepbacks and is constantly blasted in the face. Franz Wagner was enigmatic and slightly disappointing, not the rightful defensive player of the year. Chaundee Brown was a guy with questionable shooting stats and not a contest-immune gunner who is also a linebacker. Hunter Dickinson was hard to comprehend for a fanbase coming off a decade of John Beilein. Getting used to this team took a minute. Believing it took another one.

There was a familiarization process, but once they clobbered Maryland, Northwestern, and Minnesota back-to-back-to-back they were something to do. Something to care about. I know that after they won the Big Ten title my ensuing column was rather morose, but thoughts and feelings are not constant. They are sine waves that dip and recover. Yeah, this meant something.

[Campredon]

It means something. Playing a barnburner against Ohio State and being gripped by every dribble meant something. A reminder that you can be invested in and rewarded by sports meant a lot.

When they went on that enforced break the sudden loss of rhythm was palpable. Not for them, but for me. I had grown accustomed to a couple two-hour blocks each week in which Michigan basketball rented a steamroller and made an opposing team very, very flat. Now we have to re-adjust ourselves to that absence, probably bidding goodbye to a number of guys we've seen grow up in a Michigan jersey and a couple of guys we barely got to see at all.

I'll miss it.

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I have raked the leaves I did not get to last fall, and this time I am not irritated at myself for having left some of it late because it is a thing to do. I have cut the tall grasses and moved most of the mulch again. I am at the point every spring where I look at the dwindling pile and curse myself for not having gotten more. My son climbs the pile and uses his shovel to knock off bits of the little wooden cliffs my shoveling makes, one of his first genuinely useful activities. My daughter grabs a stick and shouts "mix mix mix" as she moves little bits of dirt and wood around the partially-filled wheelbarrow. She lets me take the wheelbarrow to the backyard after I thank her for mixing.

I have a shot in my arm and a date 20 days in the future for a second. In exactly 34 days I am going to Pinball Pete's with my son. Maybe I'll take him to see GODZILLA VS KONG, he's five, he might want to see a giant lizard fight a giant gorilla. Maybe I want to see that. Hell yeah. Fuck him up, Socrates.

The light at the end of the tunnel is in sight. Michigan basketball helped drag me there. So even if they couldn't drag themselves across the finish line I can't be anything but grateful. Let us sing them to sleep.

BULLET

FFS. Elegiac, oversized season-ending columns do not usually have bullets attached because the analysis can wait a bit as we sit in our feelings. This one isn't much different, but I mean come on:

• UCLA at rim: 6/9
• Michigan at rim: 13/25
• UCLA midrange: 12/32
• Michigan midrange: 4/15

It's enough to stuff yourself in a blender.

UCLA had a 4% chance of making the final four based on the quality of shots they got and let up in each game! pic.twitter.com/S2ntuMBJm6

— ShotQuality (@Shot_Quality) March 31, 2021

Ah well, bring on Moussa and the Jets.