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Category: sports history (Page 2 of 2)

Countdown to Senior Night: The Battle of the BUs – A Senior Day in Every Sense

This week at …On Being a Sports Girl, we have a series that I am hastily trying to put together called, “Countdown to Senior Night.”  (And when I mean hastily put together, I mean it came to me as I was down in the Food Court getting lunch 45 minutes ago.) Originally hatched to be a review and reflection upon this year’s Boston University hockey senior class, I decided to open it up to posts about senior days or nights in every winter sport, since we are in the midst of a whole host of them.  Of course, we’ll have a post or six about this year’s Terrier senior class, which have cemented their places in BU hockey lore for years to come.

To kick off our series, I am reposting an oldie-but-a-goodie I wrote about Senior Day for the Binghamton University men’s basketball team in 2004. I was a senior about to head off to Boston University for graduate work, and the Bearcats’ opponent that day was the Terriers.  The original post – edited to take out the non-basketball stuff that followed the original post – is after the jump.

If you are interested in contributing a piece to the series – be it about senior days for your team or about this year’s Terrier seniors, email me at sportsgirlkat@gmail.com.

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They Hate Me: Western NY’s Toxic Back and Forth Relationship with Basketball

Pravin commented earlier this week on my treatise on New York State sports fandom with a great question on basketball in Western New York:

And where does basketball fit into all of this? Is there a particular team that people in Western New York prefer to root for? I’d imagine that the Knicks–not even factoring in their past seven seasons of futility–represent everything that upstaters hate about downstate. There is the connection between the old Buffalo Braves and L.A. Clippers, but not even the most ardent fan of the A.B.A. would retain that kind of loyalty.

Now, I have been in quite a few relationships in my day, including some of those of the on-and-off, back and forth, toxic variety.  (Who hasn’t in their day?  The degrees of severity vary, but everyone’s had at least one.)  But none come close to the toxic back and forth relationship that professional basketball has had with my home region of Western New York.  Professional basketball took Western New York and toyed with its emotions – “You want an NBA Championship? Here you go. Oh, wait – you aren’t “big enough” to support professional sports!  Sorry, let’s move the team away.” – until a whole generation and their children decided enough was enough, and ceased following the NBA all together.

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