We’re sports fans around here, no matter what our other pretensions. One of our favorite diversions is watching the tournaments that clog the calendar in this season. This year, though, we’re oddly sensitized to the fact that most sports coverage is heavily dependent on military metaphors. To judge from our local sports journalists and commentators, it’s virtually impossible to call a game without resorting to some battlefield turn of phrase. It’s cool, though. We live in confrontational times. Now that the DFL and progressive politics are a thing of the past, we can expect other quaint Minnesota traditions like non-confrontation to go away too. If you can’t beat ’em—well, you know the rest.
The battles all started a few weeks ago, with the high schools. We’re convinced the one Minnesota tradition really worth defending is the state high school hockey tournament—what used to be the only pure (single-class) thing left to us. Who could have foreseen the perfect symmetry of the Warroad Warriors humiliating Simley for the Class A championship? In the less prestigious Class AA tier (the moneyed suburban schools), Anoka took no prisoners against Roseville Area. (Sorry, Area? Now there’s a moniker that smacks of a military lack of imagination.)
There’s been a lot of flak over the failures of Gopher men’s basketball late in their campaign to get into the NCAA tournament. A show of force in the NIT is, of course, a little like a show of force at the Y on Sunday afternoon, but there’s some consolation in being the best among the losers. Personally, we think it’s a crime against humanity that sports fans and journalists aren’t getting more excited about a couple other contests: The Gopher women are poised to crack the top five in basketball this year, and there’s a fair chance the women will repeat as national champions in hockey.
There’s also an exciting story blowing up in the WCHA: Mankato State and St. Cloud State both survived into the final five, just months after making the big jump from Division III to Division I hockey. (The Gophers, the Fighting Sioux, and the Bulldogs have kept hostilities limited to JV scrimmages through the years—many of which resulted in serious embarrassment that could be blown off as easily as an NIT result. Now they’re wishing they hadn’t been so diplomatic in expanding the conference.) Mankato State has been the most exciting story in college hockey this year—but why should we be surprised? They’d been policing Division II for decades, playing in three national championships (and winning one) going back to the 80s.
It’s tough to compete with a war, of course. The other day, CBS television announced that they’d asked ESPN to cover day games in the NCAA tournament—because the network has responsibly decided to cover the war in Iraq. The only question that remains is how many viewers will go AWOL and switch to buckets or hockey.
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