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Surviving the weekend’s sports bonanza
BY CHRISTOPHER YOUNG

For sports fans everywhere, but particularly in New England, weekends don’t get much better than the last three days. La-Z-Boy jockeys and TV-remote wizards had a field day keeping up with the myriad possibilities offered up by their cable outlets. You had late-night West Coast outings on both Friday and Saturday for the Bruins and Celtics; you had March Madness in both the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournament; there was NIT hoop action, with Boston College and Providence both still a part of it; you had the ECAC hockey finals pitting Harvard against Cornell; there was the NCAA women’s national-championship hockey game (again featuring the Crimson); on the links, there was Tiger as part of the Bay Hill Invitational field; and how could I possibly leave out the Food City 500 NASCAR results from Bristol, Tennessee (easily)?

Being a working man and all, it was difficult to catch much of the live NCAA hoop action on Thursday and Friday during the day, but each night offered plenty of tasty propositions to while away the hours.

Even better, with the B’s and C’s both playing on the left coast, those games would be starting just as the wife and Young young’uns were safely off to bed, so Friday and Saturday offered up lip-smacking opportunities to delight in all-over-the-dial athletic entertainment.

FRIDAY. The early-evening NCAA men’s game televised from the FleetCenter threw together Indiana and Alabama, and frankly, unless you had either of those squads going a long way in your pool sheet, who cared? It got more interesting, though, when ESPN switched over to the Maryland-UNC/Wilmington game, where the defending champs were expected to cakewalk past the 11th-seeded Seahawks, representing something called the Colonial Athletic Association. Unless one was a Maryland alum, it was difficult to root against the undermanned Seahawks, and UNCW seemingly had the game in hand at the end, poised to knock off the sixth-seeded Terps. Unfortunately for underdog lovers everywhere, Maryland’s Drew Nicholas drove the length of the floor with less than two ticks left on the clock and hit a desperation three-pointer at the buzzer to give the 2002 champs a 75-73 victory.

Moments later, I witnessed the horrifying spectacle of a final score out of the Midwest Regional: Butler 47, Mississippi State 46. There went one of my Final Four teams — knocked out in the very first bleepin’ round. So much for that sheet.

Hoping for better things, we flipped back to the land of blue lines and Zambonis, where the Bruins, under interim head coach/GM Mike O’Connell, had gotten off to a 2-0 lead in their game at San Jose. The Sharks, picked by many to challenge for the Western Conference crown this season, are merely playing out the string at this time of year, flailing through a miserable 26-34-6-7 season and falling to 13th in the conference. With Boston supposedly playing "desperate hockey" to clinch and possibly improve its playoff position — and doing so under the watchful eye of someone who’s not only a new coach, but also the guy in upper management in charge of team personnel — this should reasonably have been penciled in as a "W." The Bruins played with a bit more intensity from the start, and the squad seemed to have this one in the bag against a weary team that had nothing to play for (and was also coming off a 2-0 shutout loss in Denver the night before). Therefore, we made the switch and followed the bouncing ball down the coast to Inglewood, where the Celtics were meeting up with the hated Lakers.

The Lakers, too, had played the previous night, a road game against their current archrivals, the Sacramento Kings. The defending three-time NBA champs have been inconsistent all season long, and were only seventh in the Western Conference with a 38-29 log entering this game. The Celtics haven’t been playing much better of late, having suffered back-to-back blowout losses to New Jersey and Indiana to kick off this trip, and sport a record (38-30) nearly identical to their opponent’s. Nonetheless, Boston looked sharp in the first half and the Lakers did not; if not for Shaquille O’Neal (who scored 18 of LA’s first 23 points), they would have been completely out of it, as the C’s took a surprising 52-41 lead at halftime.

It was shaping up as a good night for Boston’s teams, although word came down later that the BC men’s basketball team ended its season with a 75-63 loss to Temple in the second round of the NIT. There was good news from Duluth, Minnesota, and Albany, New York, though, as the teams from Hahvahd reached the NCAA women’s hockey title game and the ECAC men’s hockey tournament final, respectively, each to be played on Saturday.

Bad things began to happen out West, though. The Bruins proceeded to blow that 2-0 lead, and the Sharks — despite being held to just three shots on goal in the first period and just one in the third —used that lone third-period shot to pot the winner in a 3-2 come-from-behind victory.

In LA, the Lakers came out firing in the second half, and it became obvious that nobody could stop O’Neal in the post. Shaq collected 48 points and 20 rebounds overall as LA outscored Boston, 63-44 in the second half to upend the Celtics, 104-96.

Time for bed, with nary a concern. Because, as Scarlett O’Hara once said, "Tomorrow is another day!"

SATURDAY found me doing fatherly duties, and therefore forced me to miss — for the sake of Piglet’s Big Movie — every single day game of the NCAA tournament, particularly top-seeded Arizona’s double-OT 96-95 thriller over Gonzaga. I managed to survive, though, and most of my other bracket teams hung on and remained in contention. Once the dust had settled in my living room, it was time for the daily double out West again: Bruins and Celtics. Along with the vacuum cleaner.

Boston’s hockey heroes arrived at the same arena that the Celtics occupied the night before, though this time the floor was covered with a sheet of ice and the opponent was the NHL’s Kings. Like the Sharks the night before, the Kings are pretty much out of the playoff picture, currently residing 10th in the conference. The Kings’ record of 30-34-6-4 leaves them 11 points out of the eighth and final postseason berth. The Bruins raced off to a 3-0 lead against LA, but the seeds of doubt remained in tandem with the memory of the previous night’s late-game meltdown.

As we monitored the Bruins’ progress on NESN, a click over to Fox Sports New England found the Celtics in the Rocky Mountains, taking on the woeful Nuggets. Denver’s basketball team is arguably the worst in the NBA, and has been for years and years. It had won 14 games all season, and currently is last in the conference, 37 and a half games behind the pace-setting Mavericks. The Nuggets have won only four games on the road all season, and were on a four-game losing streak heading into this contest. The Celtics, for all their problems, still should have had enough firepower to overcome such a foe.

Cut to the chases.

Heading into the third with a 3-0 lead, the Bruins took a couple of idiotic penalties early in the period and gave up a power-play goal on a two-man Kings advantage to see their lead cut to 3-1. Uh-oh; Mr. Have Lead? Meet Mr. Blow Lead. Midway through the period, the Kings cut the deficit to 3-2, and with just over two minutes left, the Bruins’ Michel Grosek was caught for high-sticking and sent to the box. Gulp. B’s fans should have headed to the sack, because they could see this situation coming a mile away: LA would pull its goalie in the final minute and skate five-on-three in the final seconds to attempt the tying goal. Roger that. With 1:30 left in regulation, B’s defenseman Nick Boynton for some reason checked LA’s Sean Avery into Bruins goalie Andrew Raycroft just as Zigmund Palffy fired the puck toward the net, and with Raycroft in a heap in the goal mouth, the puck flew over him for a 3-3 tie. No one in Bruinsland should have been surprised in the least.

The worst was apparently to come in overtime, but amazingly, former King Glen Murray tallied the winner at 2:05 of OT and the Bruins somehow emerged victorious, 4-3.

One time zone eastward, the Celtics struggled against the God-awful Nuggets, but those watching at home had to be convinced that a late-game rally would salvage the victory, even after Denver closed the first half with an 8-0 run to take a 39-38 lead at the break. In the third, the Nuggets began to pull away, taking a 60-47 lead. For disbelieving Celtics fans, this could not be happening. With nine minutes left, the home team had established a 78-59 lead, and the previously unimaginable was taking shape: the Celtics were going to lose to the 14-55 Nuggets. And they did, in spite of a late-game revival that closed the gap to eight. With a tough road date scheduled for Monday in Utah, Boston was extremely likely to limp home from an 0-4 road trip, immersed in a downward spiral that has seen the team lose six of its last eight.

Elsewhere, the Harvard men’s hockey team lost the ECAC tourney in OT, 3-2, while the women’s team lost the NCAA crown in double overtime, 4-3 to Minnesota-Duluth. Tiger Woods made mincemeat of the Bay Hill field and won the event for the fourth-straight time, this time by an astounding 11 strokes. Boston University, Holy Cross, and Harvard all saw their women’s hoops teams eliminated from the NCAA tournament, and only Providence’s and Rhode Island’s men’s teams are still playing (in the jayvee NIT).

Four Big East teams have reached the Sweet Sixteen in the men’s NCAA tourney, but the losses Sunday by Louisville and Florida have shaken up many an office-pool entrant’s dreams of Final Four financial windfalls.

Seemed like the only Massachusetts winner over the weekend was Kingston native Chris Cooper, who snagged a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Adaptation.

Win some, lose most, but you’ve got to admit: for one glorious weekend, it was a sports fan’s paradise that helped many of us accomplish what hotelier Basil Fawlty once advised:

"Don’t mention the war! I think I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it all right."

Sporting Eye runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com. Christopher Young can be reached at cyoung[a]phx.com

Issue Date: March 24, 2003
"Sporting Eye" archives: 2002

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