My Beloved Vikings Are in the NCAA Tournament!
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I can’t believe it…. the moment I’ve been waiting for since I first arrived on the leafy campus of North Park University in 1996…
…has not arrived at all. The North Park Vikings mens basketball team ended up finishing sixth in the CCIW this year.
BUT — in the category of “Next Best Thing,” the local Portland State Vikings, champions of the Big Sky Conference, have earned a date to the big dance.
Yeah, so I’m being a blatant bandwagon fan here. I’m being up-front about that. I don’t have enough time/energy to follow local college basketball, so I generally default to cheering for whichever local team makes it the furthest, which usually means either Oregon or Oregon State. If both of them flameout, or if neither of them make the tournament, then my loyalties extend to whatever is the hottest team coming out of the Pac-10.
But this time there’s actually a Portland team in the playoffs, and it’s not the Blazers! So that’s a reason to go out and get excited. They’ll probably end up as a 15 or 16 seed and get trounced by the likes of some Division I superpower like Duke or UCLA, but still… anything can happen. That’s why it’s March Madness.
Someone ought to get ahold of Ime Udoka. His alma mater finally gets a shot at the big time.
As for North Park… we’ll always have Michael Harper and all the memories.
*sigh*
“One… shining moment…” ]]>