Surreal win is something for players, fans to savor
This was a don’ttrust-your-eyes game, so unexplainable that you rub your knuckles into your orbital sockets to make sure what you’re watching is real.
Unranked Ohio State 80, No. 1 Michigan State 64. Rub eyes. Blink hard. Rub eyes. Yep, real.
This was like Iowa 55, Buckeyes 24 in football. Did just happen? Yep, happened. Blink hard once. Twice. Shake head.
If not completely unbelievable, what transpired Sunday afternoon was borderline amazing. To steal a line from a writing friend, my flabber was gasted. Here was Ohio State, with just one potential future NBA player in Keita BatesDiop, against Michigan State with two potential NBA lottery picks in Miles Bridges and Jaren Jackson Jr. And Bates-Diop got the best of them both, scoring a career-high 32 points while
Bridges languished and Jackson fouled out.
But this jaw-dropper went beyond each team’s best players. The Spartans are deeper than Chicago pizza. The Buckeyes are thin crust. They’re improving, but no one saw this coming.
Not even coach Chris Holtmann, the best hire that Ohio State has made in awhile.
Holtmann called the win over Sparty surreal, explaining that “moments like this can (give) us a glimpse of what can occur.”
And quite a 40-minute moment it was, turning a waitand-see program into a “just wait, you’ll see” team that with each win further proves that the Buckeyes got the right guy in Holtmann and rid themselves of the wrong guys in Marc Loving, JaQuan Lyle and …
Holtmann refused to include Thad Matta in that group.
“Thad and his staff deserve tons of credit for recruiting guys like Keita and (Jae’Sean Tate),” for recruiting those kind of (quality)
people,” he said, emphatically.
As for those two people in particular, even the Hallmark channel doesn’t craft cornball this syrupy and feel-good. Here was a beaming BatesDiop, who until this season might as well have gone by