Northern Iowa erupts onto the Ford Center floor at approximately 7:45 EDT on Saturday night. The #1 overall seed of the 2010 NCAA Men’s Tournament has fallen. CBS cameramen follow the Panthers around the floor as they celebrate one of the most unexpected upsets in the last 10 years of the tournament. The feed cuts to redshirt senior Mario Little who has collapsed to his knees in front of the Kansas bench. A trainer delicately places a towel under his face. Little has one more year of eligibility. He didn’t play in any of the previous 35 games in which the Jayhawks amassed a 33-2 record, won the Big 12 regular season championship and tournament, and received the #1 overall seed. In fact, Mario is coming back next year, so he still has the chance to win a championship.

Yet somehow the picture of Mario overcome with emotion mirrored what I felt, shock and despondence. Even though he didn’t play a minute of this season, he’s much more a part of the team than I am as a fan. I did not attend a grueling boot camp in August. I did not get up in the wee hours of the morning to attend practice. I did not juggle a full schedule of academic work with practice, strength and conditioning training and travel. I cannot even compete on the court with them for reasons of talent let alone age. I did not have to face and address questions from the national media after the loss. But that does no’t stop my mind from whirling between anguish, anger and disbelief.

This had all the makings of an upset. A team with nothing to lose that hit key shots, played solid man-on-man defense and grabbed offensive rebounds to extend possessions and create more scoring opportunities. The Jayhawks struggled to get any rhythm on offense. Yet, the Jayhawks didn’t fold. Sherron, as Jayhawk fans have come to expect, dug deep and overcame a poor first 30 minutes fraught with turnovers and missed shots to lead the Jayhawks into a position where they still had a chance to win the game. Bill Self, as I’ve come to expect, can put this in perspective without denying the pain:

The reason it [the loss to Northern Iowa] is [the most painful loss of my career], is a credit to the players because you work your butt off for a long time. You operate under duress, you operate under pressures the whole year that a lot of teams don’t operate under because of where we were ranked and expectations. And to put ourselves in a position that we were in, they don’t come around every year.

You’ve got to make the most of those opportunities when you are granted them. That’s probably what stings the most. I don’t know if I’ll watch the tape. I know that there’s just one or two plays here or there that was the difference in the game, but this stings a lot.

http://www2.kusports.com/news/2010/mar/21/terrible/ (last accessed March 21, 2010).

Reason does not console Bill Self, his players or me. And is my habit when grieving over a confounding Jayhawk NCAA tournament loss (Bradley in 2006, Bucknell in 2005, Rhode Island in 1998, Arizona in 1997), I vented and reflected with my brother, this time via texts:

Me: The half circle must be added next year.

Bryce: Yep.

Me: I’m not sure why Tyrel, a coach’s son, left Farokhmanesh open.

Me: I can’t believe it.

Bryce: He misses that shot, it is the dumbest shot ever.

Me: Yep.

Me: At least that f***ed up everyone’s brackets

Bryce: Sure did.

Me: I’m still pissed about those two charging calls [at the end of the game]… both were BS.

Bryce: I agree.

Bryce: I had a bad feeling all day.

Me: You had a bad feeling last Sunday [when the Midwest bracket was announced].

Bryce: I guess. When the brackets came out I hated to see Northern Iowa.

Me: That officiating crew better not ref another game in the tourney.

Bryce: I do not know what to do with myself. Can’t understand why they didn’t pressure more.

Me: They did the last 7 minutes of the game. It had all the elements of an upset. Key 3 point shots, turnovers and free throws.

Me: I’m now considering it the Ford Arena curse.

Bryce: Yep. Don’t want to go back. I just hate to see it. They played both of the games not to lose, rather than to win. They looked so tight.

Me: I’d agree that was a problem early. Part of it ironically was poor guard play.

Bryce: Agree.

Me: Never crisp enough with the slipped pick pass. It was there many times. Not sure if UNI pressure contributed.

Bryce: Yes and they never ran the ball screen right after half court. That really works when they run it.

Bryce: Self is a great coach. I do not question him.

Me: Me neither. The players have to execute. I didn’t expect this after last weekend [Big 12 Tournament] and how he’s tried to keep it light at times this year.

Bryce: I always remind myself that they are just kids.

And there it is. The big revelation about why I prefer the NCAA over the NBA. The NCAA tournament and it’s single elimination format provide the perfect setting for an on-the-court drama that often poetically reflects the pain and awakening that accompanies the natural emotional growth of teenagers molting into adults. The student-athlete tag promoted by the NCAA is a misnomer, and in many ways these kids are more like semi-pros than student-athletes. However, they are still kids in many ways playing a game they love with nothing but the reward of playing another game. Passionate, imperfect human beings motivated by something other than money.

You don’t find this intensity in the NBA except for the last 4-8 minutes of a rare regular season game or in a deciding Game 7. Heck, it’s costing the NBA money (see this Bill Simmons post). It is because many of these “student-athletes” will “go professional in something other than sports” that makes college basketball so compelling. It’s real and imperfect, just like life. As a fan, you get to watch players grow within a season and over the course of their career. It’s what makes Al McGuire’s quote that “the best thing about freshmen is that they become sophomores” resonate with both coaches and fans. It’s why I spend hours watching college basketball each winter. The same team that is outplayed in December and outmatched on paper in March can still win.

I find it hard to watch the tournament today after the loss, but I’ll be back. It is “the thrill of victory and agony of defeat” that is what draws us all to sports.

Epilogue

There is a personal element to these emotions that must be noted. Most sports fans, including myself, unnaturally hitch part of their personal identity to their sports team. The tribal aspects of sports fandoms continue to persist despite the evolution and widening of individual identity from tribe to global citizen over the last 200 years. Sports nations have also been impacted by the globalism of the information age. Their populations are no longer confined to contiguous geographic areas (Is Red Sox Nation confined to New England? No.). However these sports nations, just like the socio-political groups for which they are named (e.g. Kurdish Nation, Jewish Nation, etc.), have a diaspora (although it is not due to political or religious persecution). I grew up a Jayhawk fan and lived in Kansas my whole child life. My passion for the Jayhawks has increased over the last 20 years that I’ve lived outside of Kansas. To paraphrase what a former Kansas native once theorized in a Wall Street Journal editorial, the reason I probably follow Kansas rabidly is that it is my last connection to my homeland. I’m not sure how it factors into the agony equation, but it is an important part of it. If you have a hard time relating to this, read Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer by Warren St. John.

[Scene: A Structural Programming Anonymous meeting]

Protagonist: My name is Jason and I’m a recovering classical inheritance OO programmer. I’m mostly speak Java, but I’ve dabbled in other OO languages such as C# and Objective-C. I have unabashedly promoted the virtues of strong typing: compile-time safety, invariant types, re-use. You get the picture.

Attendees (in unison monotone voice): Hello, Jason.

[End Scene]

I now realize that my disgust for unreadable, unmaintainable code (a.k.a. “spaghetti code”) pushed me to espouse strong typing over weak typing. I must confess, I forgot the axiom: anything can be abused.

But this post isn’t so much about my past as it is about my change in perception of loosely typed languages like JavaScript. I first learned JavaScript in 1997. I was motivated to do so because I wanted to animate navigation menus and I was working a  job where we looked trade the power and arcaneness of Perl for LiveScript on Netscape Enterprise Server. All of this was before I had immersed myself in OO or Java. The lack of tools made the language feel clumsy and awkward. I never felt as productive in JavaScript as I felt writing in other scripting languages at the time: Perl, VBScript, CFML.

Fast forward to today. I’ve spent the last 10 years primarily doing OOP with Java. The use of JavaScript has proliferated. Nearly every web application I use daily runs JavaScript. The biggest internet companies like Google and Yahoo are highly invested in it. Numerous libraries exist: Dojo, Ext JS, jQuery, Scriptulous, etc. These same companies and others commit to these libraries. JavaScript is now so widely used that some claim it may be the world’s most popular programming language or the world’s must successful scripting language. While there may not be enough evidence to either prove or dispute these claims, there is no denying JavaScript’s importance in the growth of the web and its position at the center of RIA.

After becoming a TweetDeck user, my eyes opened to the use of JavaScript outside of the browser. TweetDeck is an AIR application. AIR, Adobe Integrated Runtime, is Adobe’s attempt to take over cross-platform desktop applications by leveraging web technologies like HTML, JavaScript and AJAX. Sure you can write desktop applications using Java or .NET, but there is a whole community of programmers who have cut their teeth with web technologies. Why not build thicker client applications using the web holy trinity of  JavaScript, HTML and AJAX?

I’ve now spent the last couple of weeks re-introducing myself to JavaScript. I’ve read a couple of books, started building AIR applications using the Aptana Studio plug-in for Eclipse, watched many of Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript videos available on Yahoo. This exploration has made me realize maybe the reason I didn’t like JavaScript was that I didn’t grasp the inheritance model. Much to my delight, all the things I know and love about encapsulation and inheritance are present in JavaScript. While there isn’t classical polymorphism in JavaScript (because it’s a loosely typed language, duh), I am finding that I can do with out it.

I am reminded that one of the key aspects of any engineering discipline is choosing the right tool for the job. Being able to program effectively in JavaScript is a key skill. There are merits and drawbacks to both strong and weak typed languages. Knowing when and how to use them is the key.

A weakly typed language is no more conducive to the production of spaghetti code. Spaghetti code can be as easily produced in a strongly typed language. Judgment and pragmatic programming principles protect code from chaos.

I used to think that blogging was reserved for those who write for a living (e.g. political pundits, industry analysts, journalists, etc.) and for those who have an inordinate amount of spare time. Although a reader of many blogs of people I admire, respect or find informational, I never thought of blogging myself. Why? I am one of those people who likes to think I don’t care about what other people think of me. However, I must admit that on some unconscious level, I feared that people may view me in the most negative way I can imagine: a hackneyed blowhard without anything substantive to say. In other words, sound and fury signifying nothing.

So why blog now? I spend much of my energies on my intellectual pursuits (both in my work and private life) and my family. Why spend some of my free time blogging?

1. Self-reflection and self-expression is essentially “human” and healthy. Like most working professionals, I leave work a majority of the days questioning what exactly was I able to accomplish and how do I feel about how I’m living my life. Exercising does can help temper feelings of anger and frustration, but writing may be the best for who I am. The goal here is not to influence many, but to affect some. As Craig Thompson so beautifully closes Blankets ,”How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface. To make a map of my movement – no matter how temporary.”
2. There is no better time than the present. I write at work to order my thoughts and to uncover holes in analysis and thinking.  Having worked 15 years building web based business applications, I’m very aware of the fact that never before in human history has the individual voice had such reach and potentially such affect.

This opportunity is too great to pass up. Although I prefer one-on-one and face-to-face communication with people I respect, this medium offers the promise of conversing about subjects and issues that I find important with people I would never have the chance to interact with in other parts of my life.

So out with the pessimism that I have nothing important to say and in with the optimism that blogging will enrich my life. What have I go to lose? Seems the right and timely decision as 2009 comes to a close. Bring on 2010!