In a battle between a couple of evenly matched teams, it can take but a quick interlude of momentary superiority for separation.<\/p>\n
On the court, peripherals factor to a degree.<\/p>\n
That one team is without its best player with injury.<\/p>\n
That the other wants revenge for losing less than a week ago in its final home tilt of the season.<\/p>\n
That one spilled blood in the 1st. Eye gash. Lip split. Eye poke.<\/p>\n
That the other was iffy for the most part at the FT line, but hit key ones.<\/p>\n
That one turned it over too much, and the other cashed in.<\/p>\n
That one, out of sync, never lost its grit, stayed scrappy.<\/p>\n
Surely those subliminals matter for the entire affair.<\/p>\n
Except for a minute and thirty four seconds soon right after halftime, all that and more was a wash.<\/p>\n
The Cardinals, with smoke and mirrors perhaps but mostly scrappiness in abundance, led by a penny at the break, 38-37.<\/p>\n
Even though they were -7 in points off turnovers.<\/p>\n
Miami tallied a deuce on the first possession after the break.<\/p>\n
The Cards answered with a triple.<\/p>\n
Then the telling, deciding interlude.<\/p>\n
In 1:34, the victorious Hurricanes ran off 10 unanswered. A trey. A deuce in the paint. A pair of FTs. Another two, and a lone FT.<\/p>\n
Miami scored on each of its initial six possessions after intermission.<\/p>\n
U of L failed to answer. A missed longball, a shot blocked, consecutive turnovers.<\/p>\n
That Louisville as always continued to fight and claw, twice improbably cutting their deficit to a point, wasn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n
As the game wended its way to the buzzer, there were plenty of ifs and buts and coulda woulda shouldas.<\/p>\n
I have zero inclination to make a list.<\/p>\n
The Cardinals imperfections showed.<\/p>\n
The Cardinals relentlessness did also.<\/p>\n
Haphazardly at times, they stayed in the fray, gave themselves a shot.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s all this fan can ask for.<\/p>\n
I started just now to list the players that were the most impactful, psychologically, statistically.<\/p>\n
But you know, from where I\u2019m sitting, they all gave it what they could, given all of Thursday afternoon\u2019s exigencies.<\/p>\n
Every school in the land but the league champions shall lose this week.<\/p>\n
I, for one, had no delusion that Louisville somehow would win four straight.<\/p>\n
They didn\u2019t. Won one. Lost to an equal foe.<\/p>\n
Sunday evening we find out who\u2019s next?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a battle between a couple of evenly matched teams, it can take but a quick interlude of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":182555,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[3108,123,125,124],"class_list":["post-189446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-basketball","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189446\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}