Can't do a post mortem on the season until I get my head around the loss, so...

It was different watching the game in person, and not in Freedom Hall.  Hard to get the feel for the game in the same way as watching it on TV, but the whole time I kept waiting for one of our standard runs.

Which, of course never showed up.  But why?

1.  M. State played darn good man to man defense which...

2.  got our guys flustered because they couldn't score and that...

3.  preyed on their main weakness as a team, immaturity (as it relates to basketball IQ;  or maybe better said, low basketball resilience), and therefore...

4.  they reverted to old habits of going one on one which might have been excusable if not for...

5.  the fact that they let it affect their defense too. 

Give credit to Michigan State -- they got the ball to spaces in our zone and hit the clutch medium range shots, and they were generally good at going over top of our press, much like UNC did last year.

Still...when we lost to UConn I felt that they were the better team, and 8 out of 10 times they would have beaten us. 

Against Michigan State, I felt like they were a good team -- not a great team -- against whom we played a bad game.

Sigh...I had poetic visions of going through UNC and UConn to win it all, and getting payback in the process.

I love our guys -- they were so good, and gave us a great year.  Just wish they could have gotten that Final Four for their memory collection.

Hope Rick decides to go ahead and order them BE champion rings;  they earned them.

Hope he also recruits a pure shooter or two in the interim.