Arent you forgetting Hermosa and Redondo as southern LA beaches? Thats as bad as when a girl from Agoura Hills tried to tell me Torrance was not part of LA and Long Beach was closer to San Diego. (it happened)

 And didnt Sharkeez burn down last summer in Hermosa then relocate or were there 2?

I had just moved to San Francisco; and at that time, CBS was still broadcasting certain regional games to different parts of the country. I think we were stuck with the UCLA game? So I had to get myself to a sports bar….and quick. And hence I found….the 4th Street Bar and Grill:

Which is basically a crappy sports bar inside the Downtown SF Marriott (@ 4th & Mission). So I proceeded to watch the win over Ok St there. And then the win over Auburn….and then win over Oklahoma – and then – well, you get the picture. I couldn’t mess with the mojo. If I couldn’t get the same table, I had to sit in the same section. The waitress (a hottie FOB from Russia named Olga, no kidding) knew to bring a Bud bucket to the table as soon as I walked in. I became a regular for those three weeks. That bar tolerated my table pounding and hollering quite well. So I came back for the Texas game. And, obviously, the KU game. I was surrounded by accepting friends who knew full well of my ‘Cuse hoops obsession. There were a million places I’d rather watch the game (perhaps Armory Square or the Dome) but this wasn’t too bad. The beer was cold and the victory was pretty F*ing nice!

Was at my (then) apartment in Hoboken with my (then) roommate, also a ‘Cuse alum but not a sports fan. I was so nervous I kept running back and forth switching TVs I was watching (’cause that was the reason if we missed a shot, they scored, etc) and at one point my roomie said “You’re more fun to watch than the game!”

Wore a Cuse shirt to work the next day which didn’t exactly fit within the dress code but luckily my boss tolerated it.

I went.

From what I am told, it was fun.

I’ll throw out the full story in a “FanPost” so as to not clog up the comments.

There is nothing better than giving Jimmy B. a high five on Bourbon Street post victory.

Was sitting in the top deck of the Superdome. The Texas and Marquette fans seemed to adopt us, at least those they stayed. The Kansas fans were a bunch of weird creepos, or maybe that was their Rock Chalk Jayhawk chant, whatever. The first half was an absolute high, like being drunk and tripping all at once. The halftime was the longest half of my life, something like 2 hours from what I remember. Or it just felt that way. The 2nd half was all of us sitting in the cheaper ticket SU student section up high holding on for dear life. The last two minutes were incredible and my buddy had the nerve to mention the words Derrick and Coleman. We slapped him. Once Hakim swatted Lee’s shot and then Heinrich’s prayer landed in Kueth’s arms, we were batshit crazy. I think we stayed in the SUperdome another hour or two. Once we finally got outside, we saw Donovan McNabb, shook his hand and departed for Bourbon Street, which was an incredible mix of drunken happy SU fans, drunken sad Kansas fans, drunken fat Marquette fans and Emeka Okafor picking his nose (I’ve got a picture somewhere). We stayed on Bourbon until 3 AM or so and then had to get back in the tiny car for the drive back to SU. That was the greatest drive of our lives.

I will never forget that weekend!

There was a really bad ice storm in Rochester that weekend, which left me without power (or heat) at my apartment. So I drove back home to my parents’ house about an hour away for both the semifinal and final. I got power back at my place around noon on Tuesday, the day after the finals.

It makes it easy to remember when the “last really bad ice storm” was.

I don’t remember where I was for each game during the tourney, but I remember debating on whether or not to watch the National Championship at a bar, and risk crying in public (regardless of the outcome), or taking it all in from my couch (where I lived with my now ex-girlfriend). I chose the latter and I still regret that decision.

Hakim makes the block. The last second 3 doesn’t go in. And I’m sitting on my couch too caught up in emotions to do anything but cling to a pillow. My ex turns to me and says, in a tone of voice that I still want to slap her for, “Enjoy it!” and turns away. still angry as typing

I should have broken up with her right then, as I ripped off my close to run naked in the streets. But instead we tried to make it work for another year, or some crap like that.

But I’ve since made up for this moment, watching and re-watching the end of the game, and tearing up whenever I look at The Block.

I love all these stories. And just think, most of us didn’t know each other, but even still, that night we were all somewhere out there, enjoying this SU victory together, underneath the same big sky. And even though I know how very far apart we are, it helps to think we might be wishing on the same bright star…as we watch the Kansas game tonight.

with a large contingent of Syracuse natives. In the early 00s a reasonably-sized group of friends who’d all gone to Nottingham together ended up living in the DC metro area. (This group included several members of the future Cuse Country staff.) We watched most of the games together, though not always at the same place. The ones that were on the local affiliate we watched at the house where two of the throng lived. Other times we went out to various sports bars, which in DC generally means “a bar with a bunch of TVs”. There are not many true Sports Bars in the District, though a couple have opened recently. Anyway. For the championship, some of the crowd decided to go home to Syracuse. I, being too responsible for my own good, decided not to go. I had to go teach in the morning. To this day I regret the decision.

I ended up in my apartment with my roommate (who also skipped the trip). Having watched all the other games with a minimum of four other fans, it would be weird to have it just be the two of us so I invited over a couple friends who were sports fans but did not have a strong rooting interest in the game. They graciously agreed to cheer for SU on our behalf. At halftime my roommate and I were super-pumped; towards the end we were piles of raw nerves. I don’t remember much detail other than the fact that when the final buzzer sounded we tackled each other in the hallway of our apartment while my friends looked on bemused. (It’s OK, one was a Red Sox fan and got her moment soon enough.)

Then I went to work the next day wearing my orange tie, bought as much National Championship gear as I could afford (hat, shirt, sweatshirt, shotglass, license plate frame, mousepad, DVDs), and subscribed to Sports Illustrated so I could get the commemorative stuff.

Born & Raised in Cuse (although I had moved away to Indiana & New England for a couple year spurts in the process), and I remember all those times as a child demolishing whatever I could… toys, video games, walls, you name it… whenever SU dropped a big game. We’re talking about an 8, 9, 12 year old kid having full fledged anxiety attacks when they lost, somehow transferring the team’s identity onto my own self-identity… therefore, I’d always be pretty good, but would always choke in the clutch and never get to the top of the mountain. This permeated my self esteem from a young age. As the years passed and I collected “Tournament Runner-up” trophies and “All-CNY Honorable Mention” awards, simply being second rate was the mesh underneath my flesh.

By the time 2003 came around, I was a Junior at a medium sized business school in Rhode Island. Boston had long ago become my adopted professional sports city from a young age, a silly thing happened where the Patriots won a shocking Super Bowl, and all the extra-curricular activities in which I was involved started winning whatever awards or competitions in which they competed. Even my club hockey team (I transferred from an ECAC DII team after some freshman year trouble) made an improbable run to its first league championship. Somewhere during my sophomore year, I joined a cultish organization in which we did nothing but presented all these community outreach projects we supposedly did or were planning to do in a competitive format. The Regional Championships, which were in Hartford, were the day following. So I’m sitting in a room for the whole first half of the game with the presentation team, and our little tag-along professor, swilling beers and interrupting our “rehearsal” for a steady stream of “F* Yah!’s” and “DID YOU SEE THAT” to a bunch of people who really didn’t care, but were scared to tell me since… well, maybe there were scared.

At halftime I confronted the whole team, basically telling them that we had practiced too much, and this was bigger than them. So I bolted down to the hotel bar. Sure enough, there’s a crowd around all the TV’s and as it so happens, they are all the judges for the competition. Two of them were SU alums, another was a Manhattan alum (we beat them in Rd. 1). They were all cheering for ‘Cuse. Needless to say, the farrago of booze, exuberance and testosterone made me a complete abomination. i erupted in a cacophony of screaming, gasping, wheezing, laughing, bawling… and my half of the bar couldn’t have loved it more. I ended up buying the whole bar a round so that Syracuse’s win was everyone’s win.

Sure enough, the next morning, literally half of the judges were my new buddies from the night before. We received record scores.

Unfortunately, with my sense of self fully redeemed since that night, I’ve been a boisterous a*hole ever since.

Cuse by 4 tonight.