Dr. Stockholm or: How I Learned to Stop Crying and Accept the Loss

Now that Michigan’s loss in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament has settled for a day, I feel prepared to process what happened. That’s not to say that this process is an easy or comfortable one, but it is one that I feel is necessary.

My advancement through the first three stages of grief (denial, anger, and bargaining) took place during the game. I watched with horror as Louisville seized the lead. I jumped up and down and yelled at the television and antagonized distant adversaries as the game gradually slipped from our fingers. I pleaded with any and all gods for Trey and Tim to bring us home with a W again. And when the final buzzer sounded 76-82 Louisville, all I could really do was stare at the screen.
I promised myself that I wasn’t going to get depressed if we lost the national championship game because, honestly, even the Elite Eight seemed like a distant dream at the start of the tournament. How could we get past the imposing beast of Kansas when we got handled by Penn State? How would we beat Indiana on neutral territory when we couldn’t beat them in Crisler? There were so many impossibilities that I imagined I could only be happy if we exceeded my expectations. A Final Four berth was a dream come true. Beating Syracuse was just gravy.

The greatest thing (and the worst thing) about college basketball, though, is the extent to which it is driven by mistakes. Up until the Final Four, Michigan had moved through the tournament by making fewer mistakes than everyone else. We made very few adjustments to our game plan that had us at Number 1 oh so many weeks ago, and we were fortunate to see Mitch McGary blossom at the same time. With the National Player of the Year on our squad, we were possibly the most punishing opponent to play against in the tournament; every slip up on your part was a fast break opportunity for a team with incredible speed and athleticism. If you weren’t in the perfect position for every rebound, Mitch was going to grab it from you. If you left anyone open on the perimeter, they were more than a threat to crush your spirits.

A threat that 99.9% of the United States just met last night.

It felt good to be so brilliant all the time. It felt good to be dominant. It felt good to win against teams who, quite honestly, were better than us. Once the positive feelings started rolling, that promise I made to myself to stay distant and uninvolved dissipated. When Spike Albrecht had 17 points at the half while Trey Burke was benched, I thought we could do no wrong. I felt invincible. You could hear Coach Beilein’s excitement during his halftime talk with the team as well, because it felt like we might actually go the distance. We were breathing down the necks of history, of greatness, of complete success. Our year would be crowned by perfection, that no one could surpass until 2014.

And then it all fell apart.

Louisville did to us what we had been doing to teams throughout the tournament: they abused every mistake we made. Even though Michigan had the lowest turnover rate in the country, Louisville forced something like 3 turnovers on 3 consecutive possessions. Every one resulted in a shot near the rim. Rick Pitino started calling multi-screen plays to get Peyton Siva rolling with AND without the ball. Louisville refused to allow any easy shots, even if it meant everyone on their team getting in foul trouble. We had a serious game on our hands. Suddenly, history didn’t feel so imminent. Suddenly, our invulnerability was nonexistent. Suddenly, I became incredibly worried.

Peyton Siva played like the elite college point guard that he is.

I don’t need to recap the rest of the game, because I’m sure everyone already know what happened. We can talk about blown calls, attitude, will to win, and whatever other crap all we want, but the fact remains that we lost. We are struggling to rationalize, to make ourselves feel better, to justify the positivity that we had before, because we just feel empty and stupid otherwise. That’s the fourth stage of grief. Depression. It’s also the stage that makes us irrational, bitter, and generally unlikable sports fans.

As a Boston sports fan, I consider myself an expert on this stage of grief.

This image immediately makes me hate everything.

Our objective here is to get everyone else to acknowledge that our team not only COULD have won, but SHOULD have won. In college towns, this type of behavior becomes incredibly obnoxious (and somewhat hilarious) because EVERYONE is already rooting for the same team. Everyone participates in the same circular logic enough so that they simply believe everything being said is the truth. Nobody wants to be that guy who hates on the home team because that just seems asinine. Reality forces us to acknowledge that we lost factually, but our environment is shoving down our throats the fact that we won theoretically.

What is much more difficult to do is to move on to the fifth stage of grief: acceptance. Maybe it’s a thing that only happens when you get older (although I don’t entirely believe that), because I’m finding it funny to consider colleges giant pools of grief-related depression (Note: depression, the mental illness, is not funny). Acceptance is more than just moving on, which is how most people define it; acceptance is knowing that while things could have played out differently, they did not. Acceptance is acknowledging that the other team was better than you, which is perhaps the most difficult thing to do.

Nobody wants to be inferior. Unfortunately, English is such a blunt instrument that we don’t have a more nuanced word for performing worse at something than somebody else. Last night, Michigan was the inferior team. We brought swagger. We brought our A-game. We brought a solid defensive performance. We brought our accumulated skills and experiences from being at the bottom (Penn State) AND at the top (tournament run). Hell, we even brought the best player in the country. And you know what? Louisville was better. Things might have rolled the wrong way for us once or twice, but the best team in any game consistently takes advantage of those opportunities and creates more of them for itself. Michigan did not do that yesterday. Louisville did.

Next year’s basketball team is going to look very little like this year’s. With Trey Burke, Glenn Robinson III, Mitch McGary, and Tim Hardaway, Jr. all being potential first-round NBA draft picks, we are almost certain to lose at least two key contributors. I will never fault them for leaving if they choose to do so; in fact, I would even encourage them to leave because they’re going to come back next year with the expectation that they can only go up, which is a massive failure of collective logic. Next year, the expectation will be perfection from beginning to end. Anything else will be failure, and that expectation is utterly unfair.

Perhaps the real reason I don’t want this team to come back, though, is because it achieved perfection by failing to achieve it. I can’t imagine a more perfect encapsulation of everything that I love  (and hate) about basketball than what happened last night. We fought to the end. We saw perfect execution multiple times. Yet, we saw how even perfection can be stained.

There’s nothing left that this team can deliver to us that we can reasonably expect them to give us (not just because the season is over). The probability of us just making it back to the national title game is incredibly slim no matter who stays because, quite frankly, basketball has too many variables for us to ever understand what’s going to happen. Let us take the perfection that we have already been delivered enjoy it.

At least, until next season.

 

• Michigan