The Glorious Guest Essay: Uh, It's Jitter Time

Hello, friends (Nantz! 10 hours!). My name is Ted, and I regularly write here. The site is called "A Price Above Bip Roberts," which name is almost as meaningless as its content. Recently, though, it's been a bit more relevant. See, I went to Georgetown, and as you may know, Georgetown is playing in the Final Four this afternoon - er, early evening - at 6:07pm, or, more accurately, whenever Packer is ready to start frothing at the mouth.

I'm at work right now. Yea, that's right, 7:41am on a Saturday morning - a time you should only be awake if you're taking the SATs - and I'm at work. As such, I'm moderately bored. What's resulting is a post for my friend at Complete Sports. I figured it might be comical to look at the layout of my day. Or, at least in my mind, it might be.

10:00am

Mostly done with work but still at work and needing to stay for at least another 2 hours, I'll begin pulling video of the Kingdome in 1984. I work at ESPN, you see.

10:02am

While watching an old, grainy tape of GU vs. Houston in 1984, I'll cue up "Eye of the Tiger" or "The Gus Johnson I-Mix" on my IPod.

12:00pm

Not necessarily needing to be at work anymore, I'll head to the gym. Releasing of endorphins is a necessary element of your day when your team has a big game; I'd love to see the Ohio State gym at 10:00am on a fall Saturday. I'd imagine there's a lot of sluts coming off walks of shame in there. Oh wow. That was a really low blow. I'm a terrible person.

12:18pm

I'll be halfway through my new jone piece, the actual StairMaster itself. This thing is a real bitch. If you do it at Level 3, it's basically like slowly walking up stairs, and you exert nothing. By the time you get to Level 7, you can barely breathe, and every time you take a step, you're worried about crashing six feet down on your ass. In that way, it's kind of like what I used to feel like watching Georgetown back in the day. Remember Lee Scruggs? That was depressing. I loved how Georgetown fans used to rationalize his 6-11 height and ability to "drain" the three (i.e. miss six in a row, then hit one and walk back to the other end - not run - screaming "All Day!") as "a helluva complement to Boumtje-Boumtje."

By the way, the funniest thing about Boumtje-Boumtje, besides his entire playing career, is that on the Georgetown Info Line - which you could call for people's dorm room phone numbers - his name was pronounced as "Roo-BEN Baum-Sha-Baum-Sha." I used to call that number drunk and type in his letters just to hear it. This was before I had discovered girls, or fantasy sports, or "The Power Hour."

1:01pm

Driving home now, with my engine sputtering as only it can, I'll begin to contemplate the match-up: is Ron Lewis really the X-Factor? Is Matta smart enough to take out Oden for stretches, knowing his team will play better and faster? Are we going to be down early to an extent that this ulcer I think I'm developing on my lower left side gets even worse? What happens if we win? Is there any way I can justify NOT going to Atlanta to see my alma mater play in a national title game for the first time since I was four years old and had no idea who they were? (Let's ignore what happened in '85 for a moment).

2:00pm

I'm going to a movie before the game. There's two rationalizations for this: a) I expect to drink during the game, and since I live in an area without public transportation, I don't want to drive. I needed someone to drive me, but all I could find was a girl - my friends work weird hours, you see, and most are at work during the game - and in return, I had to attend a movie with her. I was honestly hoping I could see "Because I Said So." That way, if we lose, I can always tell people, "You know, it wasn't the worst thing that happened to me that day." Instead, we're seeing "The 300," which leads into: b) a movie where I can see naked people and bloodshed is probably a good lead-up to a Final Four where I hope to see naked people (CBS has to botch a cutaway one of these days) and bloodshed (I'm thinking Ivan Harris might catch one in the eye).

4:45pm

I'll take my seat at a bar in Manchester, CT. It ain't Atlanta; it ain't even New York; fuck, it ain't even Hartford. But this is Georgetown Basketball, and this is the Final Four, and the best we ever did when I roamed that campus insignificantly was the Sweet Sixteen - and we only did that because of Hampton over Iowa State - so this means a lot. "Bartender, cue up a Sam Adams. Yea, the Winter Lager. It's game time."

After that, I'll probably start sweating profusely, cursing periodically, texting people - both girls I'm endeavoring to go home with later and my friends about the game, drinking way too much for a person in my general health condition (poor), and ordering food only serving to worsen that condition. But hell, the last time we were in a Final Four it was the friggin' NIT version ('03), so I deserve this, right?

Darn right I do. Now as for 8:30pm - am I watching UCLA, hoping against hope Lorenzo Mata brought some brass knuckles to the court so they can win and help me in my pool? Or am I frantically searching kayak.com for a way to get to ATL? Either/or, it's gonna be a good day. Er, I hope.

dan

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