Time to Let Yourself Love the Greatest Men’s Basketball Team in Northwestern History
It’s fun to watch history and know it’s history as it’s happening, which is why watching Northwestern men’s basketball this season has been one of the great fan experiences of my lifetime. It’s obvious: This is the greatest men’s basketball team our university has ever seen. Top-to-bottom, our roster is more talented and athletic and exciting than anything we’ve put together before. Our coach is more adaptable and ambitious than any other coach we’ve ever had. Our wins have been better. Our losses have been closer. There are dunks and deep threes and chest thumps and bench-clearing hold-them-back what-is-happening moments. It’s the greatest. It’s so fun to say. It’s so fun to say with confidence. Here it is again: This is the greatest team in the history of men’s basketball at Northwestern. Wow, man.
There were glimmers back when we toppled then-No. 22 Texas on November 21. Watching the highlights of that 19-point stompfest, it was clear that there was a something extra in the veins of our guys. You had never seen a Northwestern team run fast-break alley-oops before. You had never seen Northwestern players leave the bench and go scrumming onto the court and tug one another’s jerseys. You had never seen Northwestern players hit a three and turn and do the finger-to-thumb trey-ball sign toward the crowd and have other guys run over and bump his chest and talk huge things right in his face and scrunch their eyes at the other team like Not here scrub. It was disorienting. It was thrilling. These guys carried themselves differently. They weren’t here to effing go to class, they were to jam a basketball on your head and stick their nuts in your well-recruited face. It was vindictive.
The typical Northwestern underdog narrative vanished in weeks. We ripped our way to a nasty 18-4 start and we bullied our way into the—here comes the buzz word—national conversation. College hoops podcasts had to talk about us. They had to talk about Chris Collins and Bryant McIntosh and Vic Law and Scottie Lindsey and say things like, “these guys look like a lock for March Madness,” and “you have to give credit to what Coach Collins has built in Evanston.” That’s right. You had to give credit. Whether anyone wanted to didn’t matter. We were playing so well that you didn’t have a choice but to say, man, the Wildcats are good enough to do things that no other Northwestern basketball team ever has. It was an amazing feeling. There was a little bit of private-school chest-thumping to it all, a special form of “We earned this.” This wasn’t a Northwestern team you felt sorry for. No one pities those who can speak for themselves.
Of course, we faltered. Our leading scorer fell ill and we slumped a bit. We couldn’t beat Illinois, for some reason, and conference bottom-feeder Rutgers gave us trouble late. But then we harassed Wisconsin’s Ethan Happ straight into professional counseling and tore the Badgers’ big national No. 7 clean in half. We were clawing back, but then we weren’t, sinking into more weeks of losses that made you for the first time think terrible, second-guessing things about our March Madness odds. But then the calendar flipped to the first of the month, and we hosted Michigan. There was a chance at a school-record 21 wins and some of the most important bragging rights an Evanston undergrad can covet over their friends in Ann Arbor (we all had some).
The game was close. Ugly. Hateful. There was no respect and no pretensions, but it was that attitude that doomed Michigan. Because Michigan forgot this was the greatest Northwestern men’s basketball team of all time. They forgot that we don’t settle anymore, or accept mediocrity anymore, or accept overtime anymore. This team was different, and this moment was real.
When Derrick Pardon laid it in, I screamed and turned my eyes away. My hands curled into the kind of fists you make when you feel the power surging through your body and it’s as if you could explode into a ball of lightning. My roommate laughed—laughed aloud—and there was a moment where we wanted to hug but weren’t sure how much to touch one another. A buzzer-beater to win against Michigan. I don’t care what the history books say or what the records show: Other Northwestern teams didn’t do things like that. They didn’t look at 1.7 seconds on the clock and a full-length basketball court and think that’s a winnable situation. This team did though; they just conjure a certain kind of magic, and anyone who says otherwise can park my godforsaken car one day.
We made it to the semifinals of the Big Ten tournament by way of two dominant—yeah, dominant—wins over Rutgers and No. 25 Maryland. Wisconsin smacked us, but it was our third game in three days. Pros don’t even operate on that kind of schedule. You can call this just a tiny bit of momentum. We’re going into the honest-to-God En-Cee-Double-A Tournament as a read-it-and-weep 8-seed, with a shot to make some effing noise to boot. Underdogs win in March by draining threes and hustling on defense. Northwestern can do both.
The rest of the country can scoff at all the hype, but this isn’t for those people. This is for the people that just experienced the most exciting and anticipated basketball season in the history of the university. This is for the people who watched all the highlights and called the players by their first names and used the collective “we” when they talked about the team. This is for the people who, despite decades of disappointment and heartbreak, watched Northwestern’s first-ever Selection Sunday announcement and let themselves fall right back into the frenzy.
Let yourself love this team. Let yourself be swallowed up by their loud dunks and floor-slaps and wild and-one screams. Let yourself forget all the times Northwestern has done you dirty and just go nuts. Scream from your couch. Leave your seat. Jump up and down. Hide your eyes. Now’s the time go all-in. It will be tortuous, but it will be regretless, too. It’s time, it’s time, it’s time indeed.
We did it. Go ‘Cats.