In Kentucky, we care more about basketball than you do. In fact, we care more about basketball than you probably care about anything. No programs fans in America are more committed, passionate, or crazy than those of the Big Blue Nation. In college basketball, only three programs consistently matter: North Carolina, Duke, and Kentucky. The two Triangle schools have the unfortunate burden of being located where the citizenry has the most college degrees per capita in the nation. We in Kentucky dont have that distraction. North Carolinas wine-and-cheese crowd (as Sam Cassell so aptly termed them) has the Panthers, the Hurricanes, NASCAR, and the best college town in America to divert their attention, while Dukes nerdy, elitist-chic student body is too focused on entering our nations top tax bracket to truly replicate our obsession with one college basketball team. I dont care what ESPN, its announcers, or HBO documentarians try to tell you
we care more than they do, and it isnt even close.
I went to grad school at Duke and lived in Chapel Hill, expecting that my neighbors would share my passion for the greatest sport in the land. I was wrong. North Carolina and Duke fans care in the moment, but they dont live and breathe basketball 24/7, 365 days a year like we do. Triangle fans dont camp out for three days simply to attend a glorified practice (Krzyzewskiville is extremely overrated), dont wear jean shorts throughout basketball season in honor of a onetime benchwarmers nickname, and dont watch Cougar Town simply because one of the stars is a fellow fan. We dont just like our team, we obsess over it constantly. Ask any college basketball writer what happens when the masses go on alert after a critical column or the occurrence of even a small factual error in a piece on the Cats. In the new-age world of Twitter, with our ability to communicate with journalists, antagonizing the Big Blue Nation is not for the faint of heart, and to do so can put one in great nerd-fight peril.
We do this because Kentucky basketball simply means more to us. We have no professional team in our state. The primary reason you even know we exist is because of one horse race and fried chicken. The Wildcats are what we rely on not only for entertainment, but also for our states collective self-esteem. So if there is any karma or justice in the world, it is our turn to win. Our last national championship was in 1998. Since our last shining moment, Duke and North Carolina each have found a way to win two titles of their own. Kansas, Syracuse, and Michigan State each have added a ring, Johnny-come-lately UConn has had the audacity to somehow finagle three trophies, and even Florida, which barely knows it even has a basketball team, has won two.
