No shame in missing national sporting events

It’s fine if you completely missed just about everything in the world of sports over the last weekend.

In so many words, you missed a lot of discussion about the “upside” of new Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford and more about how baseballs are still flying into the outfield seats of the new Yankee Stadium.

LeBron James and a few other folks who make up the Cleveland Cavaliers swept the Detroit Pistons, and NASCAR had no-name Brad Keselowski find victory lane after a last-lap crash nearly saw Carl Edwards’ car tumble into the grandstands.

Such was the weekend in sports that you very well might have missed.

I can’t blame you, for we’re coming off a weekend that many would – and rightly so – consider the single-best exercise in college communal gathering.

The “World’s Greatest College Weekend” – I think I’ve heard that somewhere – is probably the best moniker for IU’s much-hyped Little 500.

Most events that bill themselves with an “-est” seem to have a massive failure at the hype machine.

Face it, we’ve all heard how “next season” could be the “greatest” IU football has seen in a long time, or that the opening of spring training signals the “best” shot for the Chicago Cubs to reverse the curse.

Yep, we’re still waiting.

There’s also the Indianapolis 500 – a big inspiration for the bike race – which has gained a trademarked phrase of “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing” during its 93-year history, but hasn’t been that way since the open-wheel split after 1995.

Any fight featuring Mike Tyson late in his boxing career or Randy Johnson in an appearance as a pitcher with the New York Yankees are just two more in a long list that carries the burden of being over-hyped in prediction but failing to come through.

But last weekend, “World’s Greatest” certainly applied to the festivities in Bloomington – even if that point of view comes from a slightly biased perspective.

The view from my humble abode south of campus, with a Slip ’n Slide out front and the smell of grilled hamburgers in the air, saw a weekend where fun was the only goal in everyone’s mind. That’s something, you’ve got to admit, that’s awfully nice to have today when the realities of the world aren’t so peachy.

The races? Well, if you had a vested interest in them, they were probably all you could ask for, with the winners, Cutters and Pi Beta Phi, of both the men’s and women’s Little 500 in doubt until the final lap.

But last weekend was so much more.

From the sun-drenched bands of vibrant fans to the grin fixed on your face from seeing the masses gathered along Indiana Avenue, its hard to devalue the hype everyone in Bloomington builds for the Little 500.

We’re used to Bloomington receiving attention on a national level thanks to the men’s basketball team’s accolades. But for a weekend, it was nice to know that flipping on the TV to catch highlights came as a second or third thought.

The national sports scene is a great one, and an easy one, to get caught up in. But for a weekend, it nice to know that something we’re doing in Bloomington was able to trump all of that.