While waiting at Denver’s airport to depart for Chicago and a much-anticipated Illinois’ prep hockey championship (niece Shannon Schmitt’s team won!) thoughts drifted to another Windy City-related matter. The Northwestern University men’s basketball team’s first-ever appearance in the NCAA tournament.
A few days prior, during the first Bad Daddy’s “Bad Ass” Tuesday, which raises money for Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s efforts in blood cancer research, Broncos’ quarterback Trevor Siemian, a Northwestern grad and fan, quipped, “It took 78 years.”
Haha.
Anyway, the point of this Pep Talk is the lingering effect of watching the Northwestern basketball team explode in joy when it was announced the Wildcats were in the tourney. It gave your knucklehead scribe a “Thrill of victory” moment and made this aging jock feel warm and fuzzy.
Northwestern coach Chris Collins was being interviewed. Reflecting on days as a television sports journalist it triggered this fact: These are real easy interviews. Coaxing an euphoric human being to open up? You just stick the mic in front of them and enjoy the result. When hired to lead the program the fourth-year coach let everybody know playing championship-caliber hoops was THE goal. A beaming Collins, when asked to summarize feelings at the moment muttered, “We are thrilled. We are honored. We are grateful.”
Wow. Amen dude.
Since hearing the Chicago native’s thoughts the ol’ cranium has not been the same. Think about it. Can you imagine a life dominated by feelings of being thrilled, honored and grateful? Bartender, another round for everybody! However, we know that’s foolish. Life RARELY brings moments like Northwestern basketball’s emotional high at that particular time. Enjoy them. They are precious gems.
For most of us, mundaneness and mishap are the norm. Stuff happens leaving us anything but thrilled, honored and grateful. But as Pastor Bryan Sederwall of the Denver Dream Center said the other night at one of their fantastic “Third Thursday” events, “If we always shift the blame, we will always stay the same.”
In other words, to experience euphoric “thrilled, honored and grateful” snapshot, in all probability, we MUST, initially, get kicked around a bit? Could it be that basking in utter joy would not be possible without a journey that had moments of, “WTF?”
It’s constantly talked about at A Stronger Cord. This community outreach movement that’s trying like crazy to unite America with wellness, encourages participants to embrace the importance of realizing we all have stuff. What’s critical? Let’s be students, not victims, of it!
I know, easy to talk about, far more difficult to accomplish. This week, let’s remember a basketball coach who turned around a moribund program. The 42-year-old exudes, despite challenges life throws our way, a wonderful “If we see it and believe it, we can achieve it” spirit.
For a basketball team, a high school hockey team and us, it opens the door for moments where we’re gonna be thrilled, honored and grateful. What a terrific trio with the latter, gratefulness, a bedrock of contentment.
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