On Monday morning in Punxsutawney,Pa., Phil, the groundhog, surfaced from his customary burrow and saw his shadow. As tradition has it, if the world’s most famous prognosticating rodent sees his shadow,winter will last six additional weeks.
It figures. For suffering local sports fans, winter’s end cannot come soon enough.
After the Sun Devil football team kicked it off with a fall from being a ranked Rose Bowl contender to a subpar, sub-.500 bowlless wonder, we should have seen some bad times on the horizon.
But not like this; this week has yielded a new pinnacle for the pitiful.
Formerly No. 14 in the nation, the ASU men’s basketball team stumbled at home against unranked Washington State. And if that wasn’t bad enough, a 13-point loss at Wells Fargo Arena against Washington was. It was so bad, in fact, that the team nearly fell out of the national rankings.
Adding insult to injury, the UA men’s basketball team has shown new life, sweeping through the Washington schools and gaining on the Sun Devils in the Pac-10 standings.
The Phoenix Coyotes, meanwhile, came out of the NHL All-Star break on fire. With the ferocity with which they have been burned in all three games of the season’s second half, something is awry in Glendale.
Even the ECHL’s Phoenix Roadrunners are not playing their best hockey, currently placing second to last in their conference.
Not content to stand apart by playing well, the original sports darlings of the Valley of the Sun, the Phoenix Suns, have looked sheepish as of late. Heading into last night’s game against Sacramento, they had won only three of their previous 10 games.
And then, of course, there’s the heartbreaker-extraordinaire: Super Bowl XLIII.
With the entire state swept off its feet by the Arizona Cardinals’ Cinderella postseason run, everything else wrong with the Arizona sports scene seemed poised to be forgiven. During the few minutes following Larry Fitzgerald’s 64-yard, lead-changing scamper to the end zone, the state’s sports fans were blissful.
But as we have learned to expect in this state, especially with the ghosts of Suns playoff games past looking on, it soon came crashing down — hard.
However, even after Santonio Holmes’ toes were judged in bounds on the Tampa Bay turf, all of the positivity of the local sporting community could not be defeated.
The ASU women’s basketball team has run off seven wins in a row and the men, led by Pac-10 scoring leader James Harden, are still likely to rebound from their recent struggles.
The women’s water polo team is undefeated and ranked seventh in the nation.
And, to make things even better, our school’s perennial title challengers — track and field, baseball and defending champion softball — are about to start their seasons.
Thankfully, as is the ebb and flow of sports, it seems the scoreboards and standings will someday smile on all of our teams again. This rough stretch of winter can’t go on indefinitely.
After all, if there’s one thing us Arizonans know, it’s that winter never — and we mean never — lasts forever.
