The View from the Top

By Jonny Walls

When the final buzzer sounded Monday night, it became official: The Kentucky Wildcats are once again champions of men's college basketball. It's difficult, bordering on impossible, to describe how that felt. Let's just start by saying it felt good. Really good.

Darius Miller, the senior from Maysville, KY claims his spoils.

 But, surprisingly, the feeling surprised me.

Now, for all of the non-sports fans, I'm not going to spend any more time dissecting the nature of sports fandom and why it is at least partly rational (and certainly no less rational than other widely accepted practices) because I did so recently here. Corman explored similar grounds, but from a different angle, here.

So for the time being, let's just say that there really could be something to all of this sports hysteria stuff, and there may be something legitimate behind feeling elation and defeat along with a beloved team, even if we don't fully understand it.

I have "felt" national championships before. I was watching with a group of my friends when Kentucky won the 1996 national championship, the first of my lifetime. I wore a pair of UK themed silk boxers on my head for the whole game. I ran through the streets when it was over.

I was watching with my dad and my friend Travis a year later when a highly talented and favored Kentucky team lost in overtime in the national championship game to four seeded Arizona. I cried when it was over.

I was watching in 1998 with about fifteen other friends at my friend Bailey's house when Kentucky came back from ten down at the half to defeat Utah and claim another national championship. We all jumped in her pool with our clothes on when it was over.

So the feeling, Monday night, shouldn't have surprised me. But it did.

It was partly a "can this really be happening" feeling. Understandable. I asked my wife if it was reality or a dream. She said it was real, thank goodness. But that's not surprising.

It was partly a feeling of relief. This isn't completely surprising either, bearing in mind my anxious personality.

This was me at halftime...and we were up by fourteen.

Perhaps a large part of the newness of the whole experience was how much I wanted this one. (I suspect I'm not alone in this.) When it happened in '96, I didn't know what it was like to be champions. (I suspect all the folks who were around for the '78 crown followed by twenty years of agonizing disappointment experienced in '96 what I experienced on Monday.)

When it almost happened in '97, I never doubted for a second that we would win it (that is, until the final buzzer). When it happened in '98, I got a taste of the (slight) underdog victory sensation, but there was still a sense of entitlement floating around Lexington. Three championship games in a row, two of them won; we felt we were owed the privilege.

That's all part of it. But there's something else behind it too. Something deeper: This was the first time I had experienced this wholly unique sensation as an adult, that is, as the person that I am now. And that is what is so illuminating about starkly unique experiences, like having a team you truly love win the NCAA tournament. It provides life with unmistakeable context. It's like a mountain behind you in the distance that tells you how far you've traveled.

Remember that movie you adored as a child? Remember that time you dug out your old copy (or found it on Netflix streaming, as is the way of our age) and discovered that, despite a small wave of pleasant nostalgia, it isn't nearly as magical as your younger, less-educated self thought it was?

Monday night was nothing like that.

But, remember that other movie you loved as a child? Remember how you loved the lightsabers and Ewoks and the little green guy on Dagobah and the spaceships and explosions? Remember how one day, when you were starting to grow out of childhood, you sat down to watch these movies again (it had been a couple of years since you saw them last) and something else, something even better clicked into place? Remember how you first noticed the full brilliance of Luke's near inevitable path to become his father being brilliantly visualized by the black gloved, mechanical hand? Remember how you realized that one of the greatest themes of the film was Luke's choice to turn from Darkness, and how that was the single factor that redeemed him from his father's fate? Remember how you still got a kick out of the lightsabers and the Ewoks and the little green guy on Dagobah and the spaceships and explosions, but now it was the delicious coating on something much more meaningful and precious?

That's what Monday night was like.

I could go on ad nauseum in my usual, overly analytical way about how this victory made me feel connected to my home state and my friends and helped to ease the pain of adapting to life away from home. I could go into detail about how memories of going to meet the '98 team at the airport with my dad and friends enjoyed a fresh resurgence in my emotional memory and enforced my affection for them. But I don't need to. Those are my personal reflections, and this phenomenon is universal.

The seemingly artificial, shallow moments of joy, like seeing your home state's team claim the crown again, provide some of the best perspective there is to be found in this life. Only now, Kentucky fans aren't looking at that mountain in the rearview. We're back on top.

And that feels good. Really good.

By Jonny Walls