About everything that can be said about the Vols loss on Thursday has been covered. Furthermore, I am still not in much of a mood to discuss it yet. These things take time. However, I did enjoy this post by Vercingetorix in the Tennessee Vols Forum:
I decided to go to my local pub tonight and have a few pints. I thought that I would watch the first half and then go home to watch the second. Needless to say, although I am not normally a person who believes in magical thinking, I refused to change anything after the first half. I ended up watching the end of the game in what ended up being a roomful of OSU fans and people who had OSU in their brackets. UT was not very popular.
I paid my tab with five minutes left. When the game was over, I drained the last half of my pint and immediately stalked out while the OSU people were still screaming. On the way back to my car, I heard a random chick on the street crowing about how the Buckeyes had won. I had the abrupt urge to yank her down in the street and urinate in her face, but since she was surrounded by a bunch of beefy idiot-looking guys, I went on to my car. I turned off the radio as soon as I got in the car, because I didn’t want to hear anything. Driving home, it was like somebody had kicked me in the stomach. I am running an NCAA pool but yet I don’t want to watch any more of the games, either tomorrow or for the rest of the weekend. I just don’t care anymore. Just let me read the antiseptic scores on the ticker and mark the sheets, but don’t make me watch any of the games that Tennessee should have been in. The last thing I want to see is a sports page, dammit.
It was then that I recognized this feeling as exactly the same sort of kicked-in-the-balls feeling as LSU ’01, Georgia ’01, Florida ’99, Alabama ’05, etc. Losing sucks when you care. And it was then that I realized that really and truly, Tennessee basketball matters again.
Tonight sucks. But thank you, Bruce Pearl.