Wednesday was one of those all-too-rare feel-good days in Minnesota sports, with Kevin Garnett not just coming back and playing with the Wolves but also helping them win by 20 in front of a raucous Target Center crowd.
Thursday, then, had the feeling of a classic letdown. We're not used to having nice things around here, so with the Wild at Nashville … the Gophers men's basketball team at Michigan State … and the Gophers men's hockey team at home against Michigan State … well, one win out of three would have been the expectation.
Instead, improbably, it was a clean Minnesota sweep — with all three teams providing impressive responses to adversity in their own ways.
The Wild was center-of-the-sun hot coming out of the All-Star break, but a bad home loss to Edmonton threatened to undo some of that good work and potentially start a cold stretch the team can ill afford. Playing at NHL-leading Nashville did not figure to be the antidote to stop the bleeding, but in a strange way maybe it was the perfect opponent. Whereas another soft opponent at home wouldn't have forced the Wild to focus like it did Thursday, Nashville gets everyone's attention. The Wild gave a classic road performance in dispatching the Predators and reaffirming that it is a legitimate threat to not just make the playoffs but do damage once there.
The Gophers men's basketball team is at the point of its season where you learn about character. Minnesota was 5-10 in the Big Ten going into East Lansing, where the Gophers hadn't won since 1997. This season, through a combination of some poor luck, some close losses, some bad chemistry and some underachieving, hasn't met anyone's expectations. It would have been very easy for the Gophers to sleepwalk through a 15-point loss. That, frankly, is what we expected. Instead, of course, they pulled out an overtime victory that while probably too little, too late when it comes to the NCAA tournament, at least shows the team has not quit on second-year coach Richard Pitino.
The Gophers men's hockey team, meanwhile, fell behind 3-0 at home to Michigan State in a game it could ill-afford to lose … only to come storming back for a 5-3 victory to keep pace in the Big Ten (and more importantly avoid a damaging loss in the PairWise Rankings).
It's hard to know, really, what to make of all these positive developments heaped atop the KG game on Wednesday. The pessimistic Minnesota sports fan would fear a massive comeuppance over the weekend.
Maybe we should just make like a cliche and take this one game at a time?
