“A coward comes in and shoots a King Soopers.” – The Denver Post

INDIANAPOLIS – On a night when Colorado flooded in tears, the pain could not go away.

With just over a minute left in a 71-53 defeat to Florida State that eliminated the Buffaloes from the NCAA Tournament, point guard McKinley Wright IV won for the last time with a CU jersey from the walked off track.

Coach Tad Boyle pulled him tight and buried Wright’s face in his right shoulder. Two men whose basketball lives have been tied up in big wins and crushing defeats over the past four years are embraced in a snippet that lingered for ten seconds.

“I told him I love him. And I do. The child is special, “Boyle fought back tears. “The player is supposed to cry, not the coach.”

Basketball is a fraternity, and the games we play can fill us with childlike wonder. But over the past twelve months, damaged by pandemics, political divisions and senseless deaths, sport has never given us a real chance to make our problems go away.

On this sad Monday, tragedy fell in the street of the Buffs House in Boulder. Wright and his teammates learned shortly before tipoff for the biggest game of their young lives that a grocery store was barely two miles from the CU Events Center in Boulder home to gruesome murder.

A coward went in and shot a King Soopers. And it’s struggling, ”said Wright, painfully aware of the mass shooting at home. ‘Life is so much bigger than basketball. Basketball is just a game. People lost their lives today. ”

Boyle chose to discuss the shooting with his team only after the game because the Buffs could not play, and he wanted his players to be focused on the task. However, as CU warmed up on the floor of the Indiana Farmers Coliseum, the deadly bloodshed in Boulder weighed heavily on the coach.

“I felt an emptiness in my stomach,” Boyle said.

The state bursary is firmly planted on the old north side of Indianapolis, and the yellow brick barn where the Buffs sued for a Round of 32 game against Florida State feels as rooted in the Middle East as a John Mellencamp song. This gym is short-lived and a bit musty, but lives with the rich flavors of history in every nook and cranny. Mel Daniels and the Pacers won ABA championships in this spot. Paul McCartney and the Beatles made young fans turn in 1964 and scream with joy until the walls shook.

But in the first half, discouraged players from the CU made Boyle look in disbelief and wonder where the magic of the team’s thrilling win against Georgetown two days before went. In a building opened in 1939 for local farmers to display livestock, the Buffs really stepped into it.

“This loss depends on me,” Boyle said, taking responsibility for the Buffs’ failure to prepare for the Florida defense length and relentless pressure. “I do not blame our players.”

With 6-foot-9 Scottie Barnes, a highly regarded NBA draft prospect who regularly plagues Wright, the Buffaloes shot 31% of the field and committed 11 turnovers during the first 20 minutes. They were lucky to score just four points as they jogged to the locker room at halftime. Boyle refused to believe that the CU was distracted by the tragic news form Boulder.

When Wright picked up his third offense early in the second half, the Buffs sounded on edge. But they showed the resilient fight that Boyle praised all season. When senior guard D’Shawn Schwartz drilled a 3-point basket with 11 minutes, 54 seconds left in the game, Colorado cut Florida’s lead to 36-35.

Then it all unravels for the CU, in an ugly pile of turnovers, clawed jumpers and a twisting grip that turns on Wright, wherever he turns. The Seminoles wiped out any final drama with a decisive run of 19-6. When Boyle was slapped with a technical foul while begging for the mercy of the refs on his point guard, you knew it was all over, but the cry in the last 6:19 of an otherwise amazing season.

On nights like these, when basketball apparently does not count for much of anything, and nothing can stop the hurt of a violent country, it is a CU coach and his point guard who can be divided by their age difference or the color of their skin could do was to hold each other tightly. Sometimes the best thing all of us can do is give someone we love a hug.

“It puts basketball in its place,” Boyle said, after the death toll rose to at least 10 in Boulder, another city whose false belief that it could not happen here had been violently shattered.

“If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. We need to figure out a way to stop these things. ‘