Categories
Basketball

The Championship Crucible

It’s one of the most indelible images in NBA history: Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden standing courtside, with Sixth Man of the Year Harden’s arms draped over his two All-NBA teammates, looking on from the bench as the Heat wrapped up their gentlemen’s sweep of the Thunder in the 2012 NBA Finals. It was simultaneously a moment of acceptance and defiance—the Thunder were beaten, but seemed galvanized. After all, those three dudes would be unquestionably be back, and this was just part of the learning curve for the NBA’s next great team.

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Basketball

Clear Eyes, Steady Hands, Can’t Lose

David J. Phillip / Associated Press

There’s a scene in The Departed where Billy Costigan (Leo DiCaprio’s character) is asked by his probation-mandated psychiatrist to describe how it feels to do what he does as an undercover cop working the Boston mob scene.

Costigan replies: “You sit there with a mass murderer. Your heart rate is jacked. And your hand? Steady. That’s one thing I figured out about myself in prison. My hand does not shake. Ever.“

There might be no better way to describe the 2021-22 Villanova Wildcats than that clip: Clear eyes, jacked hearts, steady hands. No matter how choppy the waters seem to get, these ‘Cats never get lost at sea.

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Categories
Football

Growing Gains

Last year around this time, I wrote about Tom Brady and the internal conflict of rooting for someone who meant so much to me for two decades, even though that person no longer played for the team I care about. It was the first post in this blog’s history (a history that also includes a breakdown of Harry Potter’s Quidditch career and a dissertation of how Real Housewives of New York reflects the decline of American society for those interested), and a lot of words to basically say “I wish Tom Brady was still on the Patriots, and I wish him the best in Tampa, but I’m still like 30% salty about this whole thing”. I probably could have saved a lot of time and energy by just posting Doug and Jem’s fight from The Town and calling it a day:

Behold, the most Bostonian pronunciation of Florida (Affleck’s “Flahridahr”) ever filmed.
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Music

Annual Playlist: The Best Albums of 2021

I spent an arguably unhealthy amount of time listening to music this year. According to the data from Apple Music (yes, I’m one of those people), I listened for 1,023 hours in 2021, and that’s just from that streaming service. Naturally, absorbing that much music is going to lead to likes, dislikes, and opinions ranging from “pretty agreeable” to “this is an insane person”. With the year coming to a close, I figured it’d be a worthwhile exercise to give my top ten albums, plus a few honorable mentions, for this past year. Please note: this is a totally arbitrary list, meaning I’m not entirely sure if it’s the ten best albums I listened to over the last 365-ish days, or my ten favorite, or just the ten I happen to be thinking about at the moment. Either way, here’s my year-end list for 2021. Hopefully you, my dear reader, will find something new that you might have missed, or be reminded of a great album from earlier this year that’s worth revisiting. On to the good stuff!

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Album Review

Review: Red (Taylor’s Version)

There’s something special about an album that, upon listening, recalls an extraordinarily specific time and place. The first few seconds of the first track blare over your headphones, speakers, or whatever listening apparatus is handy, and suddenly you’re instantly transported from wherever you are right now to wherever you were when you initially heard that collection of songs.

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Baseball

Disappointed But Not Surprised

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - AUGUST 18: J.D. Martinez #28 of the Boston Red Sox is unable to catch a single off the bat of Gary Sanchez #24 of the New York Yankees in the second inning at Yankee Stadium on August 18, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by Mike Stobe/Getty Images)

Baseball, more than any other sport, is truly Shakespearean. Everything happens so gradually, so deliberately, it’s almost impossible to actually be surprised. Even the best plot twists have been foreshadowed ad nauseam, and are less twists than the culmination of an entire play’s worth of intentional choices and actions. We’re not supposed to be shocked by Hamlet’s death, nor Romeo and Juliet’s death, or the end of Richard III’s reign. We’re supposed to reflect on all of the little moments that led to that grand, tragic finale. Baseball is no different. A 162 game season, containing three-and-half-hour marathons with hundreds of pitches and no game clock, leads to end results that may not have been expected in April, but by the time October rolls around are logical conclusions deduced from dozens of key moments over the course of a long campaign.

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Categories
Album Review

Cosmic Heroes and Average Joes: Teens of Denial, Five Years Later

Last spring, during the height of the pandemic in New York City, I binged Watchmen, both the original comic by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and the HBO miniseries sequel from Damon Lindelof. For the uninitiated, the stories take place in an alternate history in which masked vigilantes are real and the norm. It’s a rich world with incredibly complex characters, and isn’t afraid to tackle huge moral, philosophical, and psychological questions.

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Categories
movies + tv

Amazon Prime’s Invincible and the Rise of the Anti-Superhero

There’s a case to be made that “College”, the fifth episode of The Sopranos‘ first season, is the most important television episode of the last 25 years. For those who need a refresher, it’s the episode where Tony takes Meadow on a few college tours in Maine, while Carmela stays home and has an almost-dalliance with Father Phil during a thunderstorm. While in Maine, Tony spots a former rat of his mob Family at a gas station, and, because this is what the mafia does, the trip turns from a fun father-daughter bonding weekend into a vengeance mission that ultimately concludes with Tony strangling the rat (named Febby Petrulio) in Petrulio’s own witness-protection-gifted backyard.

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Football

Julian Edelman, Dustin Pedroia, and the Glory Days of Grit

Julian Edelman’s retirement earlier this week was far from a surprise. If anything the writing was on the wall last week, when Patriots beat writer Karen Guregian reported that Edelman was unlikely to be able to play the entirety of the upcoming 2021 season due to the “chronic” knee issues that plagued him last year. So, on Monday when news broke that the Patriots were terminating their star wideout’s contract, I didn’t bat an eye (okay fine, maybe it was a half wink situation). I knew what was coming next.

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Categories
Basketball

Wildest Dreams

Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports

How awesome is it having March Madness back?

That’s obviously a rhetorical question, for two reasons. First, the ol’ blog post format doesn’t exactly allow for much back and forth discourse. More importantly, though, there’s no need to give a real answer here because the only response should be self-evident:

It’s truly, deeply, intrinsically, exceptionally, fucking awesome.

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