t breaks your heart," Bart Giamatti wrote about baseball. If that's what he thought about baseball, I don't even want to know what he'd call the emotional roller coaster and agony of March Madness.A vast majority of major league baseball fans will never get to know the team's stars, the parents of those stars or the team's manager. Rather, we admire from afar day after day, year after year, referring to the players by their first names as if we knew them.
With the exception of the occasional one game playoff, rarely does the season break one's heart in a swing. There are playoff series. Best of five. Best of seven. It's a slow burn before it goes cold for the winter.
College basketball? The NCAA tournament is win or go home. One minute you think you're moving on to the next round, the next you're canceling your hotel room for the rest of the weekend. Now you're hot, now you're done.
And then there is Davidson College basketball. Unlike the Kentuckys, the Carolinas, and the UCLAs, we lived on the same halls as our players, went to class with them in Chambers, and ate with them at the Commons. We're classmates.
Coach McKillop may as well tack on professor, alumni relations, development and career services to his title. He never forgets a name, a face or a conversation he's had with you and he makes himself available after every home win at the Brickhouse Tavern in Davidson for a beer. Where else can you do that?
We know our players. We know their parents. We know our coach. We're not fans, we're family. Hell, we don't even have fans who aren't directly affiliated with the college. At least, that's what I thought.
So while you would think that Davidson's 59-58 loss to Marquette on Thursday would have broke my heart as I stood in attendance at Rupp Arena, it did not. No, that happened well before Marquette's last basket. In fact, it happened before the game even started.
At the tail end of the Butler-Bucknell game, prior to the start of the Davidson game, I met Richard. A native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, Richard drove to Lexington, Kentucky for the game wearing his #30 Steph Curry Davidson jersey. He was alone and he was squatting the seat next to mine. I asked him his affiliation to Davidson.
He wasn't a student. He wasn't an alum. He had no direct connection to the small school from outside Charlotte, North Carolina. He had seen Davidson play in Detroit at Ford Field five years earlier. Ever since then, he said, he had followed the team. He was, by far, the most hyped fan in my immediate vicinity. He knew the team well, more importantly he said he followed Davidson because he loved its fans, how passionate they are and how personal an experience it is. He had only one question:
"Do Davidson fans still sing 'Sweet Caroline'?"
I smiled and nodded. That broke my heart. I had a lump in my throat the rest of the day.
Fans believe in their teams. The Davidson family believes in what Davidson stands for; Trust, Care, Commitment. The basketball program is simply an extension of a campus-wide phenomenon.
So congratulations to Marquette for defeating Davidson and advancing to the next round of the NCAA tournament. But when it comes to breaking my heart, Marquette, you come in third behind the categorical altruism of Davidson and the effect it had on a perfect stranger. Welcome to the family, Richard.
