the weirdest feeling.

i'm a duke fan. always have been. ever since a box of duke championship gear was given to me by my dad from a duke buddy of his when they beat kansas for the title in '91. i'd really never heard of duke, but i wore all the stuff everywhere and it kinda stuck. i've been to cameron and walked on the floor. it was some sort of pilgrimage i had to go on in college. love the tradition. got to meet jj redick and some of the 2004 team in the locker room. one of my favorite moments ever. i'm a duke fan. i haven't seen them play live yet, but i'm gonna. in the pic above, i'm smiling ear to ear. one of the best days of my life. i worked a camp called crosspoint for a couple summers and my final summer we were at campbell university in north carolina for a couple weeks. there we met a church sponsor whose dad was the head of maintenance for duke's famed basketball stadium, cameron indoor. they heard i was a duke fan. i saw them in duke shirts and we became best friends. i'm cool like that or something. they asked if i'd like to see the campus and tour cameron. ummm...DUH. and by duh, i meant yes, please. well, the drive was only an hour or so, and so all the sports nuts on our college staff drove to durham and had to see it. i drove so fast. come to find, that white, egg-shaped, 12-passenger van had a V10 engine. neato frito. i had to get there. in hindsight, they shouldn't have let me drive. the reason josh isn't that happy in the picture above is because he was a student at Kentucky and well, they don't really love duke. why? watch this. but jward is a champ and he wanted to go anyway. (he is a nashville kid too, whose first love is vandy. and our parents are principal buddies back home...yeah, we're brothers). all this to say, i should have been the happiest camper when the blue devils won the whole thing last night. i should have. but i wasn't. i was excited, but it was the weirdest feeling. for the first time in my whole adult life, i didn't really want either team to lose. so weird. i love what coach k said in his press conference after the game. (yes, i watch that stuff. i'm a nerd). he talked about how even though his team may have won, butler certainly didn't lose. i agree. and if butler had won, i think i'd have the same feeling. weird. and just so the record is straight, i said to a bunch of people a couple months ago that gordon heyward was my favorite player to watch in college basketball. the kid's legit. and he almost made the biggest shot in the history of college basketball. and that fadeaway over zoubek should've dropped. it looked perfect. i really think they'll be back. go bulldogs. btw...they have the best mascot with a sweater in college sports. google it.

g