Women’s basketball dominates in NESCAC Championships

CHAMPIONS continued from back from Gonzalez and Kelly killed off any hopes for a late Trinity comeback as Tufts ended the game with a comfortable 19-point margin. Gonzalez shot 3–5 from deep, her second-highest percentage this year and wrote about her shooting mentality.

“My mindset for open looks is honestly just to shoot them,” Gonzalez wrote. “If I’m open, I know my team and coach trust me to make them. I think I’ve grown a lot this year in developing my games in other areas, especially defensively, and that has propelled me to play well offensively as well. I will continue to expand my game to help lead the team to success.”

Russell wrote about the evolution of the team and emotions after the final buzzer sounded.

“It felt amazing. I am so proud of this team and how much we’ve grown together this season in order to win a NESCAC,” Russell wrote. “It means everything winning with your best friends. Each year each team brings something different to the table. This year we bring a lot of energy, desire to win, and just a love for playing the game with each other.”

Gonzalez also paid tribute to the Jumbos’ coaching staff, highlighting head coach Jill Pace, now NESCAC champion both as a player (with Bowdoin College in 2009) and coach.

“Coach Pace, Coach Sam Mancinelli, and Coach Vanese Barnes are … amazing coaches on and off the court,” Gonzalez wrote. “They know how much we care about the sport and each other and support all of us with everything we do. They are able to coach us in ways they know can elicit success from us. In my two years, I’ve learned, especially from Coach Pace, about the importance of sticking to your principles and never wavering them for success.”

But what made this moment worthy of stopping a regular season basketball game? There is nothing special about the circumstance — it was a regular season game between two teams struggling to compete for a play-in spot — nor was there anything particularly special about the shot. Had James instead broken the record by dunking so ferociously on Kenrich Williams that he would have to consider retiring from the sport of basketball altogether, I may have needed a minute or two.

The only obviously special thing about the moment was a number: 38,387. That was the bar Abdul-Jabbar left when he retired, theoretically “intended” to be jumped. But the number is meaningless. It is a random five-digit amount. If 38,388 is the prophesied number to signify the coming of the basketball lord, I must have missed that verse.

Nobody cares that James has now pushed the record to 38,450 and counting. All that matters is that he did. And it is precisely because nobody did for almost four decades that it mattered.

Abdul-Jabbar’s record would have been tastier had it not been broken, and to me, the all-time scoring record is one of the more flavorless ones out there. It is the achievement constructed over an incomprehensibly long period of time and was inevitable before the season began. Lame.

The coolest records in sports are a combination of longevity and elusiveness. It had been clear for a few years that, barring a catastrophic injury, James would break the record eventually. There is no zest, no dramatic intrigue and no real possibility of failure.

Contrasted with Joe DiMaggio’s unfathomable 56-game hitting streak — something that theoretically could be broken by any player at any point in any season before the 106th game — the NBA scoring record seems pretty flat. DiMaggio’s streak is the perfect record because it is neither impossible nor inevitable, nor could it ever become inevitable. If Mike Trout was nursing a 56-game hitting streak, the entire world would sit on a knife’s edge for every at-bat in the 57th.

Maybe records like Abdul-Jabbar’s are meant to be broken because they will almost certainly lose their allure sometime before the death of the universe. But the best records, like DiMaggio’s hitting streak, should never be broken. Its coolness is a direct function of time and will eventually approach infinity. If Trout — or anyone else, preferably someone not on the Yankees — ever stares down that 57th game, I might be the only person in the world rooting for the pitcher.