Two Weekends in the City

This weekend is all about watching college basketball on TV.  But I spent good portions of the last two weekends in New York City.  Two weeks ago, Jon was in town for work.  I went into the city on Friday evening to get dinner with Jon and Kyle.  I didn’t really plan on blogging about this, but Saturday was certainly worth a blog post.  Friday night, we met at the Perfect Pint.  It was a Friday in Lent, so fish and chips it was.  By the way, I still don’t understand why fish is allowed on Fridays in Lent, but I don’t make the rules.  Fish and chips are fine, but it’s not too exciting.  There were a couple other seafood options that sounded more interesting, but I didn’t feel like they would have kept in the penitential spirit of Fridays in Lent.  By the way, amphibians and reptiles are also allowed on Fridays in Lent.  I don’t know if I’ve ever eaten an amphibian, but I have had alligator in Florida.  I don’t know if I was going to find any reptiles on any menus in Manhattan though.  To drink I had the Perfect Pint Irish Red.  Although it’s a house beer, it’s brewed somewhere upstate so I still haven’t had a beer brewed in Manhattan (to the best of my knowledge, I haven’t had one brewed in Queens either, I’ll have to try to take care of that at a Mets game this year).  Manhattan doesn’t really seem to have breweries, probably because rent is too expensive, but there seems to be one place that makes their own beer pretty close to Penn Station, Death Avenue.  I don’t know when I’ll be in Manhattan again, but I’ll have to check it out the next time I’m there.

I stayed with Jon on Friday night.  We were in lower Manhattan and he mentioned going to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum on Saturday morning.  I hadn’t been there before so I was definitely in for that.  It’s hard to describe.  In the museum, you’re pretty much working your way underground.  If you live anywhere near the city, you should definitely go.  One thing I learned was that when the buildings were built, there was concern about how close they were to the water.  They were worried about water leaking in underground so they built this huge wall underground to keep the water out.  Then there was concern that the wall wouldn’t hold up after the attacks, which would make the cleanup much more difficult, but it held.  I also learned that they took all the stuff that they dug out to build the buildings and used it to expand the island of Manhattan.  There were all sorts of artifacts to see there.  It was pretty emotional.  The last thing we saw in the museum was a temporary exhibit on sports after September 11.  That was pretty cool.  I recently watched the entire Ken Burns Baseball documentary.  The first nine innings came out in 1994.  The tenth inning was released in 2010.  It was great, but I did have some issues with the tenth inning.  There was lots of coverage of September 11, but no mention of the Mike Piazza home run to give the Mets the lead in the first professional sporting event in New York after September 11.  There was also no mention of George Bush’s first pitch in Game 3 of the World Series in Yankee Stadium.  What’s up with that?

This was the last piece pulled out of Ground Zero.

Mike Piazza's jersey from the first game in New York after the attacks

This was the greatest first pitch in baseball history.

After the museum, we went back to the hotel to pick up our stuff.  Jon was staying another night in the city with another friend.  After parting ways, I stopped at the graveyard at Trinity Church before heading to the subway.  Alexander Hamilton is buried in the cemetery at Trinity Church.  Besides Hamilton, the other people buried there that I knew of were Robert Fulton, Albert Gallatin, Horatio Gates, and John Peter Zenger.  Then I headed back to the 9/11 Memorial.  Jon and I had walked around it, but I checked their website and figured out how to find specific names, so I found my friend Bobby’s father’s name before heading home.

Alexander Hamilton's grave.  Notice all the coins that people leave there.

Freedom Tower

I was back on Thursday night for my favorite most likely completely meaningless sporting event of the year, the Big East Tournament.  Somebody other than Villanova, Marquette, Seton Hall, or St. John’s would have had to win it for it to have any meaning.  I met Adam for St. John’s-Marquette.  It was nice to see St. John’s, but it would have been nicer to see a more competitive game.  Five minutes into the second half, St. John’s cut Marquette’s lead to six.  Then Marquette destroyed them.  They won 86-54 and Markus Howard had 30 points and 7 rebounds.  Adam left shortly before the start of the second game, which was Georgetown-Seton Hall.  Seton Hall was up 53-28 at halftime.  I did not stay for the second half.  Georgetown did not make it interesting.  Myles Powell had 31 points.

Our view on Thursday night.  I was supposed to be over to the right a few sections for Friday night.

I was supposed to come back Friday night, but life got in the way.  I missed two good games.  Villanova had a nice late comeback and beat Xavier in overtime.  Seton Hall beat Marquette by two.  With the two semifinal games, Seton Hall-Villanova was the championship game I wanted.  Those two teams will bring lots of fans to Madison Square Garden.  Xavier-Marquette would have not been as exciting.  Since the new Big East was created, five different teams have made it to the championship game.  The five old teams (St. John’s, Villanova, Georgetown, Seton Hall, and Providence) are much closer to New York and are always going to have more fans at Madison Square Garden.  Fortunately the championship game has always featured at least one of those teams.  The five teams that haven’t made the championship game since the new Big East was created are St. John’s, Georgetown, Marquette, DePaul, and Butler.  St. John’s hasn’t made the championship game since 2000 (which they won).

I went back to the city on Saturday afternoon.  I went to the 5:15 vigil mass at St. Francis.  It’s a very short walk to Madison Square Garden, but I was a little concerned about getting in on time for a 6:30 game because of lines to get through security at the Garden, but it was a very efficient mass.  I was out of St. Francis at 6:01.  I was meeting Vin in the Garden.  We’ve been to many Big East Tournament games together, but this was the first time we were doing the championship game together.  It was a good game.  Villanova led by two at halftime.  It was back and forth for most of the second half.  Kevin Willard got a technical foul about halfway through the half, which allowed Villanova to tie it.  With three minutes left, Villanova went up nine, which I think was the biggest lead of the game for either team, but Seton Hall was not done.  Myles Powell made a layup to cut the lead to one with 16 seconds left.  Eric Paschall made one out of two free throws to give Villanova a 74-72 lead with 14 seconds left.  Myles Powell missed a three that would have given Seton Hall the lead with four seconds left and then that was the game.  Paschall had 17 to lead the way for Villanova.  Phil Booth had 16 and was named tournament MVP.

Four Big East Championships in five years for Villanova.  They now have five all time, which is tied with Syracuse and only behind Georgetown and Connecticut with seven.

Villanova is on quite an impressive run.  They’ve made it to five straight Big East Championship Games and won four of them (including the last three).  Their only Big East Championship before this run was in 1995.  Villanova has been a good team for a while.  Jay Wright has gotten them to the NCAA Tournament 14 out of 15 years, but what they’ve done for the last five years is pretty amazing.  I’ll always be grateful to Villanova for defeating the forces of evil to win National Championships in 2016 and 2018.  Because of that, they’re my second favorite college basketball team.  But they’re a distant second.  I would like to see St. John’s, Seton Hall, Georgetown, and Providence give them some more competition in the Big East.  I don’t dislike the other Big East teams, but I always root for the old Big East teams before the new ones.

As always, I love the Big East Tournament.  Every session was sold out with the exception of Thursday afternoon (which was just a few hundred tickets away from being sold out).  I wish Notre Dame was still in the Big East.  I despise Duke, North Carolina, Syracuse, and Rick Pitino (who used to coach an ACC team).  I would love to just go back to the Big East and be the 11th team.  But I came up with my ideal scenario for Notre Dame men’s basketball.  I’ve had lots of ideas on this blog and this is probably the most unrealistic one.  The idea is that for men’s basketball only, the Big East is a national conference of Catholic schools.  We go with sixteen teams in four divisions.  You play the other three teams in your division twice and the other teams once for a total of 18 conference games.  Here are the divisions:

Northeast
St. John’s
Seton Hall
Providence
Holy Cross

East
Villanova
Georgetown
Xavier
Dayton

Midwest
Notre Dame
DePaul
Marquette
Creighton

West
Gonzaga
St. Mary’s
San Francisco
Loyola Marymount

Butler would be welcome to stay if they converted to Catholicism (in that scenario, I guess I’d kick out San Francisco or Loyola Marymount and move Creighton to the West), but if not, those are my teams.  Of course, the conference is still called the Big East and the tournament is still in Madison Square Garden.  If you win your division, you get a top four seed and a double bye.  The rest of the seeding would just be done by record.  Besides having a national conference of Catholic schools, I helped the Big East out by adding some diversity of colors.  Currently, nine of the ten teams use blue in their color scheme.  And except for St. John’s and possibly Marquette (yellow), blue is the primary color for those teams.  I’m adding some green (San Francisco), red (Dayton and Loyola Marymount), and purple (Holy Cross).

I told you this was pretty unrealistic.  But I could have made it even more unrealistic.  For example, I could have gone with Boston College over Holy Cross, but I stayed with non-FBS schools (Notre Dame is the exception, but I’d go back to being totally independent in football).  I also could have just had Gonzaga and St. Mary’s from the west coast and added in two of St. Joe’s, St. Louis, St. Bonaventure, Duquesne, Iona, Fordham, and LaSalle, but I wanted four west coast teams to make the travel a little easier on Gonzaga and St. Mary’s (also I figured Villanova wouldn’t want to share a conference with St. Joe’s or LaSalle and St. John’s wouldn’t want to share a conference with Fordham or Iona).

Sadly, my dream conference is not to be.  I’ll just have to continue to enjoy Notre Dame basketball (hopefully, I didn’t enjoy this year) and Big East basketball separately.  Of the teams still alive in the NCAA Tournament, I’m rooting for Villanova, Gonzaga, and Iona.