Well, we won with ease. Leon Powe had 22 points and a tournament record and career high 20 rebounds, more than the whole USC team, Omar Wilkes, Ayinde Ubaka, and Theo Robertson all hit key threes, and the Bears' free-throw shooting, while worse than usual, was adequate. Tomorrow we will probably lose to Washington. But regardless of the outcome of that game, we damn well better be in the Dance. So should my dad's Syracuse Orange, after beating top-ranked Connecticut in a thrilling overtime contest that I was sadly not able to watch live.

BTW, though, in case you think that I'm only capable of thinking about basketball at this time of year, you'll be happy to know that A) I spent my morning English 380 class explaining the anthropological, Marxist, and psychoanalytic understandings of the fetish, then applied it to a 1922 bank advertisement from The Outlook; B) spent my afternoon English 489B expanding on a hard-to-follow argument about the way in which the Annales School brand of historiography and the self-consciously postmodern variety, though outwardly having little in common, together represent a two-pronged assault on traditional conceptions of History "with a capital H," then went on to trace the history of hermeneutics, from the early years of the Christian church through Hans-Georg Gadamer; and C) just ate a bunch of stale Cheetos -- the crunchy kind -- while watching the game, confirming the fact that I can transport myself away from domestic entanglements with a few orange-fingered passes through the bowl. Go Bears!!!