In a strange twist, when Kent State's Bryan Bedford nailed a 3-pointer as the final horn sounded Wednesday night at Alumni Arena to give his team a thrilling 69-68 victory over the UB men's basketball team, it assured me that nobody was going to walk out of that gym a loser.
Had Bedford not hit the shot, his team certainly would have felt like losers, one of the Mid-American Conference's best teams falling to winless Buffalo, again.
The Bulls had no reason to feel like losers, not after that game, regardless of the outcome.
It pained me to see the sting on UB's faces as they watched the Golden Flashes celebrate. Most stared on blankly, the way a man does when his girlfriend tells him she has been cheating. The anger and frustration builds inside, but the energy to move or say anything escapes you. Oddly, for as angry as you are somehow this is your fault. If only you had done this, said that, things may have come out different.
The Bulls deserved better Wednesday. Turner Battle deserved better. B.J. Walker deserved better.
Such is the nature of sport, somebody has to lose (unless it's hockey and then kissing your sister is acceptable, but that is another relationship analogy for another time). Yet, just because you lost does not mean you're a loser. UB, a team made up mostly of freshmen and sophomores, took the defending MAC champs down to the wire. Kent State came in ranked No. 1 in the nation in field goal percentage, No. 4 in 3-point percentage, and had lost back-to-back games only once in their last 156 outings.
The Bulls played their best game of the season.
So we've established that neither team walked out a loser. Who else was there?
Ah, the media. There were a lot of us there Wednesday; some of us were even being paid (ha, I get paid to go watch basketball games that I'd be going to anyway - paid by three different publications even). Ok, we are losers most of the time, but not Wednesday night. We ate free pizza and had top-notch seats for the best basketball game of the season. My only regret - man I wanted to cheer so badly.
So what about the 2,254 in attendance? Their team lost and all that taunting went to waste.
The fans, mostly students by the way, were the ultimate winners. I challenge anyone to find someone who went to the game and did not have a great time. About as much fun as one can have for free on a frigid evening in Buffalo. For Christ sake, there were a couple groups of students who never even sat down. I'd say they made the game even more enjoyable for all of us - uh, except for one Antonio Gates (so I see y'all saw that truck stop rest room wall in Ashtabula as well, for a good time ... I never called).
I know who the losers were ... those who stayed home in their little dorm rooms watching Celebrity Mole. Or worse yet, those who did homework! Actually, homework should not even be assigned when there is a big game on campus like that. I mean, if Georgia can get a whole day off for the football game, then we can get a "no homework" day. C'mon faculty, where is your school spirit? It's not like you accidentally left it locked in your car one day and when you came back it was frozen to the inside of your windshield (I thought I did that once but it turned out it was just water).
And here is another group of losers, the basketball fans of Western New York, especially those in Amherst. I found it disgraceful that there were so many empty seats in the paid sections. There was hardly anyone in the red seats. It's going to be a long time before another "Elite Eight" team comes to WNY again. For less than the cost of one Sabres ticket they could have crammed in their god-awful mini-van, drove the five minutes to Alumni, and been a part of something special. People like my father still think we are Division-III.
As a kid I used to keep a ticket stub collection from my most memorable games. Wednesday's stub would have gone right between the "May Day" Sabres game and the 1996 Buffalo Bandits Championship game docket.
That, however, is neither here nor there. But there is one thing I do know, with continued performances and student crowds like the one on Wednesday, UB's basketball players will soon be winners.
