Keith Strudler

Everyone has moments in life when you feel the passage of time, when you realize you’re a long way from where you once were. I had one this week when my oldest son played his very last high school lacrosse game. I actually didn’t make this one in person, since it was about an hour away, but I did watch the live stream and saw his last home game in person just a few days prior.

Years in the future, there will be full bookshelves dedicated to Indiana Fever basketball star Caitlin Clark. Some of those, we assume, will be about her athletic prowess, assuming the former Iowa college star continues her rise into basketball royalty.

We are officially in the heart of college graduation season, with a whole bunch over the past several weeks and a full slate of big name colleges taking center stage this weekend.

Fans of the New York Knicks are about to engage with one of the seven deadly sins. And no, it’s not pride nor envy, although I’m sure they’ve been guilty over the years. Knicks fans are about to experience feelings of greed.

The law of unintended consequences is both one of my favorite expressions and also probably overused, or at least misused. Because in the end, pretty much everything we do has consequence beyond the intended, assuming there was intention. So it’s more likely you don’t really care much about what else might happen, at least not enough to change course.

There is little more uncomfortable in sports than watching a top athlete in the NFL draft slide from a high first round prospect to a spot much further down. Maybe someone who was expected to go in the first five picks fall all the way to the second round, and watching their expression every time a team passes.

There’s a current commercial that I find fairly amusing where a younger married guy starts to say out loud that they’re planning on redoing their kitchen, even though they clearly hadn’t figured out when or how they might pay for it. And as the commercial goes, his uncertainty turns to self-assuredness as he and his wife discuss how they can save for their new kitchen, quartz countertops and all. It all started with saying the seemingly impossible out loud, and before you know it, that dream becomes a reality.

When I first started working on today’s commentary, I was planning on talking about torpedo shaped baseball bats, which is this relatively new phenomenon of moving the sweet spot of the bat a few inches inward that this year is taking the historically unchanging world of baseball bats by relative storm.

This is my last reasonable chance to talk about college basketball before it officially goes into the cooler of the American sporting offseason. Unlike the NFL or even college football, NCAA basketball is not a year-round sport, except to the obsessed or those working in the profession. For everyone else, now’s the time when we move on to the NBA playoffs or the NFL draft or baseball’s opening.

Successful football teams often have an unstoppable weapon. Like for Army football, it’s the triple option. For the Tom Brady New England Patriots, it’s the two minute drill.