CHICAGO -- The difference between Friday and Sunday is the difference between a party night and a school night, between the fun starting and the fun ending, or, in college basketball's thrilling, season-ending tournament, the difference between a future and a past. Three Michigan schools, two of them strangers to this kind of spotlight, woke up Sunday with a sweet taste of success and dreams of more, more, more. By evening, reality had hit home: One taste was all there would be.
Right off the bat, I confess a certain nostalgia for my school years. I had fun. I had friends. I had laughs. So perhaps my logic is blurry. I never realized that being a boy was such a distraction.I knew girls were a distraction. I discovered that in sixth grade, when the first girl I liked cast a quick glance in my direction, fluttered her eyelashes, and I felt a queasy, goose-bumping rush. At that moment, the teacher could have said "America was discovered by hyenas" and I would have written it down.
So much has been written, broadcast and debated about Brian Ellerbe -- the job he has done with Michigan basketball, good, bad, whether he should get to keep it -- and over and over, people keep missing the points.First of all, his biggest accomplishment was not winning over his players, it was winning over his assistant coaches.
NAGANO, Japan -- The Games began, for many of us, the moment we took off our shoes. It is a Japanese custom politely -- but forcefully -- inflicted on visitors as soon as they step inside. And in retrospect, it serves as a fitting symbol of these mild and friendly Olympics, which often required stepping out of old-heeled ways and getting used to a new soul, or what Monty Python might call "something completely different."
NAGANO, Japan -- When she finished the performance of her dreams, she threw her hands in the air and began to run across the ice, bouncing on her skate tips, her smile as big as the arena itself. She ran on pure adrenaline, like a kid running to meet her daddy at the airport gate -- only it wasn't the airport, it was the Olympics. And it wasn't Daddy, it was destiny. Look who just grew up.
NAGANO, Japan -- "Come, Alberto, we take walk.""Si, Mitchi," Alberto Tomba says. "We take walk." I pat him gently on his shoulder, and we move along the mountain path, the cold morning wind shaking snowflakes from the trees."Vino, Alberto?" I say, taking a flask from my satchel."No, Mitchi, grazie," he says."Panna?" I say, taking a roll from my pouch."No, Mitchi, grazie.""Dolce?" I say, offering a candy bar."No, Mitchi." He pats his growing stomach. "I am still in training, si?"
Mitch Albom writes about running an orphanage in impoverished Port-au-Prince, Haiti, his kids, their hardships, laughs and challenges, and the life lessons he’s learned there every day.
