Don't talk to me today about the health care bill, drilling for oil or any other such weighty matters.
Yes, they're vitally important but for one day, they can take a back seat to a sports event.
A sports event that will consume every person in West Virginia.
In case you just crawled out of one of the caverns at Smoke Hole, West Virginia University's basketball team is in the Final Four, a happening that occurs about as often as a Halley's Comet sighting. (After seeing Halley's Comet in 1986, I can assure you this is much more exciting.)
The song of the day? How about America's Today's The Day? Or Rod Stewart's Tonight's The Night? Or Michael Jackson's This Is It? All good choices, but there only can be one choice - Country Roads.
One Denver Post writer suggested that if West Virginia wins the national championship on Monday night, John Denver will rise out of his grave and join Mountaineer fans in singing the song that has become a Mountaineer tradition. (When is the state legislature going to make it the official state song? West Virginia Hills - come on. Sorry, I said no politics today.)
This, as I'm sure our Vice President would agree, is a big deal.
After playing sports for more than 100 years, West Virginia is on the verge of its first major national sports championship.
More than a century of heartbreak will either continue or forever be erased.
The Mountaineers couldn't have a better opponent tonight in Duke.
While West Virginia is a blue-collar team without a single high-school all-American, Duke is a destination university which automatically gets more than its share of elite recruits. Individually, Duke has the better players. But as we saw against Kentucky the most talented group of individuals doesn't always win, not when it runs up against a group of individuals who play more for the name on the front of their uniform than worry about the one on their back.
The Mountaineers aren't some free-flowing basketball team that makes it look easy. ESPN columnist Rick Reilly describes West Virginia as playing an "artless sledgehammer style that sucks the air right out of the gym.''
While some take that as negativity, it's a pretty apt description. One that typifies this blue-collar team and this blue-collar state, where a sledgehammer isn't a foreign object.
It's appropriate that West Virginia's most successful team in 51 years is led by a WVU graduate, Bob Huggins. It's appropriate that it includes a family member of the most recognizable name in Mountaineer sports history, Jerry West's son, Johnny.
Perhaps it is Zeke from Cabin Creek who best sums how Mountaineer fans feel about their team.
Here's West, who played in WVU's only national championship game and was a 14-time NBA all-star with the Los Angeles Lakers, later becoming the team's general manager.
He's been involved in more big games than perhaps any basketball player who ever lived. But he can't even watch WVU play - it makes him that nervous. It means that much to him.
It means that much to us all. We've waited all our lives to see West Virginia win a national championship and now that it's two wins and three days away, we're all anxious, nervous, and virtually every other human emotion that exists rolled into one.
It won't be long before we'll be back to worrying about the rest of the world that surrounds us. But for two hours tonight and hopefully two more hours Monday night, we'll turn our entire focus on Mountaineer basketball.
And if West Virginia wins both games, sometime around midnight on Monday, listen carefully and you may just hear an entire state singing in unison.
Contact Dave Poe at dpoe@newsandsentinel.com
