It's about time we posted about the National Championship game, won by a school which I not only attended in the late '90s, but am currently attending*. The Kansas Jayhawks of course beat the Memphis Tigers, a game that I thought was over when Memphis really started to slow it down, and when it was a 9-point lead at the 2-minute mark, and when that stupid free throw was tipped out, and when Derrick Rose hit that %#@*&%^% bank shot, and CAN WE CATCH A BREAK HERE?!?!? DO I NOT PAY MY TAXES AND OCCASIONALLY BREAK FOR WHEEL-CHAIR BOUND CHILDREN IN CROSS-WALKS!?!?!

*I will save you the lengthy story, but the short version is that I attended the University of Kansas for three years, 1997-2000, where I absolutely imploded my GPA because I spent a little too much time here, and here, and here, and with these two, OK, maybe not those exact two, but two who looked a lot like them. Those were magnificent years, one of which I lived in Oliver Hall, the dorm just across the baseball field from Allen Fieldhouse, and camped out for many Jayhawks games, and saw Paul Pierce hit about 37 consecutive shots against Oklahoma on Senior Night and my ears are still ringing. I used to go to Jayhawks football games, too, back when they were pretty bad. I even got to help tear down goalposts when Kansas beat Colorado, back when the Buffaloes were still relevent, although probably not as relevent as we were imagining at the time. I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up, but eventually got lucky and stumbled into the William Allen White School of Journalism at the age of 22. It's a fabulous school with brilliant professors, but unfortunately it requires a 2.5 overall GPA before it will hand you a diploma. Two years of pseudo-effort only pulled me back up to a 2.48, or something, a fact that didn't stop me from getting my first newspaper job. Or the second. Or the third. Or this one here in Fresno. Still, though, the idea of me attending college for parts of six years without getting a degree is somewhat disconcerting to my mother, so this school year I finally signed up for an extension course -- "Introduction to Marriage and Family Planning," because it was supposed to be the easiest -- and that's what I'm currently taking. I'm a little behind right now (SHOCKER!) and have to finish it by June, so you never know, I might be a KU student next year, too. Oh, and I need a good grade to bring the GPA up, and let's face it, if I could get good grades, I wouldn't be in this mess. (Yeah, that's the short version of that story.)

Of course it turned out that Kansas could catch a break. They got a steal, a couple clutch baskets underneath, the Mario Chalmers' 3-pointer that will be talked about in small Kansas towns* for the rest of time as we know it, 'til all the continents drift back together and dinosaurs make a comeback. Memphis missed a couple free throws late, which everyone had predicted would come to haunt them, including this blog, which had them losing to some red team from California with a tree for a mascot. I still contend that free-throw shooting was not the Tigers' downfall. They weren't THAT bad, 12-of-19, and when you're talking about the final minutes of a national championship game, I'm not convinced that any team makes all those free throws down the stretch. It's not your average pressure we're talking about. OK, the Jayhawks made theirs, which is I guess why they're champs, and now I'm supporting the missed-free-throw premise which I had just declared somewhat irrelevant. Moving along. Pay no attention to the details.

*West-coasters out here in California have no concept of just how many small towns there are in the Midwest. They're all small. Here's a good example: I went to high school in Hugoton, Kan., a town of 3,000 people. There were 62 people who made it to graduation in my class. Kansas high schools are spread between 1A (smallest) and 6A. Hugoton High School, with graduating classes of a few dozen people, is a 4A school. One of my buddies in another town was in a graduating class of five, and used to brag about being class secretary. Lawrence is one of the bigger towns in the state and Fresno is six times as big. And that's if you're including the 30,000 students at Kansas.

Those photos from earlier in this post were of the celebration Monday night in Lawrence. I've heard stories that there were 40,000 people on Massachusetts Street in Lawrence. That's the bar district in Lawrence, a seven-or-so block stretch of one street, a little like the Olive Street portion of the Tower District here in Fresno except a LOT more bars and many, many obnoxious Kansas apparel stores. It is certainly not built for 40,000 title-crazed fans, but at least there was no major damage done, unlike after the 1988 Kansas title, when I'm told there were some issues with keeping police cars right side up. Little bit of the same grunge feel, cool coffee shops and young people with bikes and skateboards and dreadlocks. It's pretty sweet. So imagine that. There were 40,000 people on Mass Street. In Allen Fieldhouse, there were 10,000 people acting like the game was happening right there, doing the same pre-game chants, holding up newspapers when Memphis was introduced, tossing confetti during made baskets, Waving the Wheat, singing the alma mater and doing the Rock Chalk Chant* when the game was wrapped up in overtime. I couldn't find a good video of the Jayhawks Waving of the Wheat, but I continue to say that its the only true waving of the wheat in college sports today. Schools with their own versions should be banned from NCAA competition. Anyway, all that was going on in Allen Fieldhouse, WITHOUT A GAME. Except for the broadcast on the scoreboard. People even rushed the court at the end of the game -- something I'm not sure whether to be proud of or embarrassed about -- and that never happens at KU.

*Don't ask me what it means. I have no idea. Someone, somewhere, knows, but it isn't me.

As I was discussing on Sporting News Radio this week, I actually watched the game from a cabin in Bass Lake (no, of course not my cabin; I'm still paying on these shoes) with several guys. Two guys were cheering for Memphis just to be pains, I think, but most everyone was cheering for Kansas, and a couple guys needed a Jayhawks win to seal up their bracket pools. When Chalmers hit that three, it was the closest thing to a heart attack I've had since the Boise State Fiesta Bowl*. I went from a reclined position in a chair, to mid-air. Instantly. Pretty sure my feet never even touched the ground. I was the first person to jump eight feet directly from his butt. You could have driven a Honda Civic under me. The rest of every hour since is a little hazy, and which is scary considering it's Thursday now. My dad called Tuesday and said one of the local radio stations in southwest Kansas was playing the KU fight song every hour on the hour, which he also said had gotten old after about 90 minutes.

*For that one, I jumped and actually landed on the coffee table. There was someone sleeping in the next room, so I couldn't even scream, just ran around the house like a mime on fire, wishing there was anyone to high-five or yell "DID YOU SEE THAT?!" (Not sure whether I mean a mime actually on fire, or a mime pretending to be on fire, but I guess it works either way.)

I've been going to MSNBC.com* (edit: NBCSports.com) for most of my KU coverage because one of their editors, Mike Miller, is a fantastic guy and a Kansas alum. Also, I was in his wedding last summer. So yeah, I'm biased, but he does good work. Here's the clips of the postgame press conference. Notice Memphis coach John Calipari saying pretty much the same thing I did concerning missed free throws when he says, "They're not machines, these kids. They're just not." Interesting that my dad said something similar when he called, about how remarkable it is when you realize how much pressure is on these basketball players, how much you as a fan ache and celebrate with every basket, die a little with every pass and steal and rebound, and then at the end they stick a microphone in front of a player's face and he sounds like an overgrown boy. They're teenagers. They'd be shooting hoops in the driveway, dunking oreos and thinking about girls if they weren't in San Antonio with millions of fans and millions of dollars bending on every move they made.

It's crazy. Just plain crazy.

(*Edit: "MSNBC.com" is no longer correct, or perhaps doesn't even exist. I still works, apparently, if you type it and hit the "enter" button on that Internet thingie, but I'm told that is not how we should be referring to the site. It has become NBCSports.com, for reasons I do not understand, but surely involve somewhere in the neighborhood of $3.2 billion and two CEOs murging into the same human being.)