Old Men

Hopefully everyone remembers from last year: Today is St. Paul’s feast day.

In one of his letters, St. Paul refers to himself as an “old man.”

This consoles me as I careen through my fortieth year, an old man with rickety knees and a memory like a sieve.

Sometimes I listen to this sweet song, which takes me back to the spring when I was twenty-three:

Even more encouraging is the fact that, in Christ, we live forever.

Here are a few words from St. John Chrysostom about the holy Apostle Paul:

Paul, more than anyone else, has shown us what man really is…Each day he rose up with greater ardor and faced with new eagerness the dangers that threatened him…

As for tyrannical rulers or the people enraged against him, he paid them no more heed than gnats…Death itself and pain and whatever torments might come were but child’s play to him, provided that thereby he might bear some burden for the sake of Christ.

…The men’s basketball season progresses one tough game at a time. That said, I have two words for you, Hoyas fans: National Championship.

Odds-On Favorite

Let’s congratulate the Louisville Cardinals for winning the Big East regular-season title. Last night they went into the belly of West Virginia, and bested the Mountaineers with a smile.

It is a little hard to believe that, just one short year ago, the Georgetown Hoyas were the Big East regular-season champions. But let us not dwell on such things. Nostalgia can be so bitter.

To give you my own personal feeling: As far as I am concerned, it has always been all about the Big East tournament anyway. For me the NCAA tournament is an afterthought.

Short-Pants Era and other Reminiscences

Mount Tabor, seen from the north

One year ago today, we priest-pilgrims with were with Archbishop Burke at the top of Mt. Tabor.

Tigers! Bengals?

First of all, did you know that in Europe, they put fried eggs on their club sandwiches?

This is something I never knew. I was reading a column in the Financial Times, a British newspaper. In order to make sense out of what I was reading, I had to put two and two together.

The column only makes sense if a club sandwich requires a fried egg. The man who wrote this column lives a high-flying life, to which it will be hard for us to relate. Nonetheless his is an entertaining tale of sandwich enjoyment (or regrettable lack thereof).

Secondly, let me apologize for allowing SIX hours to go by since the Hoyas beat the Memphis Tigers in overtime before I got on this blog to whoop it up.

Yeahhhhh!!!!!

Yeeeeahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!

I couldn’t get to this sooner because the overtime ended literally at the very moment I had to go over to church to prepare to celebrate Holy Mass. And I just haven’t had a free moment in the past four hours. But let me repeat:

Yeeeeaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!

Last year, Memphis went to the NCAA finals. Admittedly, this year they do not have Derrick Rose. In fact, the Tigers do not have a point guard at all.

The Tigers made mistakes this afternoon. But so did the Hoyas. And the Hoyas couldn’t buy a bucket for long stretches of time. Somehow Georgetown pulled the game out nonetheless.

(Web facsimile. Actual banner does not look like this.)

The lead changed in the game 18 times. There were 15 ties.

When the game went to overtime, the Hoyas had more gas in the tank when they needed it.

I was sitting in the Verizon Center last night during the Caps game, looking up at the banners in the rafters. One of them reads: Georgetown Hoyas, NCAA Champions, 1984.

It would be nice to have another one of those.

Meanwhile…Redskins? Please? (1:00 kickoff tomorrow)

Unignorable

Baseball fans have every right to complain. “Father, how could you run this blog as if Major League Baseball did not exist? How could you go on and on about the Redskins and the Wizards (before the NBA season has even started), and not once mention the American pastime? What kind of sports blog is this?”

A good question. Nonetheless, I was prepared to keep ignoring Major League Baseball, perhaps for another fortnight. In fact, when the Red Sox had a pitching change at the beginning of the seventh inning last night, I turned off the t.v. It was over. Some team that didn’t even exist when I was growing up was going to the World Series to face the Phillies.

Boy, did I make a big mistake. (I am not the only one. Apparently, some of the Red Sox fans left Fenway Park at the same moment that I decided I had better things to do than to watch the dismal death of the ’08 Boston Red Sox.)

Anyway, in case you did not read your Sports’ page this morning: the Red Sox scored eight runs in three innings in one of the greatest comebacks of playoffs’ history.