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When I’m not banging my head against the wall after watching the Terps lose, I do have other hobbies.  One of which is history.  Well laying in bed this morning staring at the ceiling, one particular quote came to mind, Thomas Paine’s “These are the times to try men’s souls” speech.  Actually the speech was called “The Crisis” but if I said, hey remember the Tom Paine’s Crisis speech, most people would give me a blank stare. 

But Paine basically delivers one of the, well basically, one of the best half time speeches ever given.  He tells the American’s “The Day’s of the Sunshine Patriot are over”, which is basically saying the band wagon fans have left.  All that remain are the true believers and we have nothing but ourselves to lean on.  He continues on to say that anything won easily is never cherished and only through these trials can we truly win the independence we deserve, the independence we love, the independence we will appreciate and defend.

Well comparing sports to war, is always a touchy issue, though pretty much common practice, but I’m comfortable with the idea that anyone reading this can distinguish between the importance of winning the American Revolution, and today’s Miami game.  But if I were Gary Williams, I’d rip out of a page of Thomas Paines playbook (even if he is a Virginian!) and use this speech to rally the troops. 

Though you can’t compare the magnitude of the importance, it fits everywhere else.  We are just 12 guys against the world, everyone has left us for dead, you are now playing basketball for the guys sitting next to you in this locker room.  We buckle up, we can turn this thing around and save the season.  And if we can, it will make everything that much sweeter because we did it for ourselves, and we did it by ourselves.

I know it seems like a long shot, but so did having a rag tag group of farmers and blacksmiths forming a country from scratch while simultaneously fighting off the most powerful empire in the world.  What would our country be like had England simply said “OK, here you go, here’s your country, heck will even buy you a Captiol building and some boats for your navy to get you started.”. 

As Terps fans this truely is the winter of our discontent, but just like when Thomas Paine wrote the Crisis in 1776, the war isn’t over yet.  But it is gut check time.  We’ll know tonight how the Terps and Comcast respond.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 8:46 am and is filed under Maryland Terps Basketball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.