NCAA Trip to Denver!

Wow! It's been a great week! Slim, his friend Mitch, and I went down to Denver for the 1st round of the NCAA Tourney, and had an absolute blast. We got to see four 1st Round games on Thursday, two 5-12 matchups and two 4-13 matchups, and two 2nd Round games Saturday, which ended up with both #4 and #5 seeds advancing to play each other. We had been following the bracketology projections all season long, and really liked who we ended up with in Denver.

The matchups:

10:30 AM - #5 Michigan State v. #12 Temple

1:00 PM - #4 Pittsburgh v. #13 Oral Roberts

5:30 PM - #4 Washington State v. #13 Winthrop

8:00 PM - #5 Notre Dame v. #12 George Mason

In any sporting event, my theory is that it's always more fun to have a rooting interest. So before we left, Slim and I decided to pick a team in each game we wanted to win, and then we were painted letters on T-shirts representing each team.

Our Picks:

Temple - shirts said "X-MAS" (Temple's best player is named Dionte Christmas...no joke)

Pittsburgh - shirts said "PITT"

Washington State - shirts said "WSU" (both Q2's Nikki Laurenzo and Jennifer Rohrer graduated from Wash. St., so we had to support...Go Cougs!)

Georgre Mason - shirts said "GMU"

In the first matchup, Michigan State aboslutely shut down Temple, and Christmas was held scoreless in the 1st half, and scored only 3 points all game (averaged 21 ppg during season). So we didn't have too much to cheer for.

However, in the 2nd game, Pittsburgh came out on fire, and we were pretty excited about it since we now had something to cheer for. As PITT kept up their offensive firepower, we ended up standing and cheering for most of the game, and I guess some photographers noticed. Because the next day, this surfaced in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review:

We became media darlings in Pittsburgh! And for those of you who don't know, that's me on the left, Mitch in the middle, and Slim on the right.

Needless to say, we were all pretty excited about the picture when we found it the next day. Throughout the game, several photographers, including one who we think was from NCAA Championship Photos, came up into the stands asking us for our names so they could put them in picture captions.

And then, as we were walking out of the arena after the morning session of games, KCNC, the CBS affiliate in Denver, stopped us to interview us for a story they were doing. They said they were looking for PITT fans, and seeing as how we were dressed the way we were, we figured we would oblige.

None of the other games proved to be as eventuful as that Pitt-Oral Roberts matchup, but that alone was easily the biggest highlight of our entire trip. There were so many good stories and funny moments that the three of us will remember for the rest of our lives, but that picture will always stick out.