(Warning: If you want anything approaching detailed exegesis in the moment, read tankertoad's fanpost. You have been warned.)
I defer to MaconDawg when it comes to basketball, for the obvious reason that he is able to offer analysis more sophisticated than mine. Quite frankly, if I tried to describe a basketball play, I would sound like Benjy Compson. "He ran and he ran and he passed and he passed and he shot and he rebounded and they all ran some more."
I have nothing against basketball, however; there merely is so much room in one human heart for rabid passions, and I have a wife and two children and a religion and a career and football and baseball and a Faulkner problem sufficiently severe that I make Benjy Compson references for no apparent reason. There are only so many hours in the day, people.
I recall one time, though, when I was a kid, that my parents and I went to see the Georgia Bulldogs play the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets at the Cotton States Classic at the Omni (I told you it was when I was a kid) and we were three drops of red in a sea of yellow and a clearly better Georgia Tech team held off a furious rally by a scrappy Georgia team ("scrappy" and "flukey" seem to be the two best bets for a Georgia men's basketball team, though perhaps that is changing), and, after the game, a roaring drunk Georgia Tech fan who refuted the notion that their yahoo quotient is perceptibly smaller than ours stood atop a bench or a concrete planter or the like harassing passing Bulldog fans, including us. As we walked by him, he yelled at my mother and my father and me (I apologize for the profanity, but I feel the need to relate the story accurately): "'Dawgs ain't shit!"
I didn't break stride, but, as we walked by him, I turned, looked up at him, and said: "And Tech is."
That pretty much sums up how I react to a Georgia-Georgia Tech basketball game. Train up a child in the way he should go, and all that.
It's tough to admit this while the Ramblin' Wreck football team is still in action, but, for those of us whose loyalties lie in Athens, football season is over and we're still counting down the days until women's gymnastics season (featuring blogging by Suzanne Yoculan!) begins, so, from my vantage point as the least well-informed Georgia basketball fan you are likely to find, let me just say that it's great to be a Georgia Bulldog after beating Georgia Tech in the sport that means almost as much to them as football does to us.
In principle, I agree with U.S. Congressman Jack Kingston, who said that "no one watches basketball but a bunch of ACC weenies." Even so, though, four wins in the last five games, including one over our local rival, may offer an early inkling that basketball soon may be something other than the sport holding Georgia athletics back.
Hey, it's a start.
Go 'Dawgs!