What have you done lately?

Basketball is a game in which memories are short. A player makes a last-second shot and he “won” the game for his team. No one remembers that earlier in the game he made costly mistakes without which his team might have been comfortably ahead and there would be no need for heroics. Come NCAA time and it is the wins late in the season that loom large, far less than the losses in the first few games. All this tends to trivialize the game, encouraging the flashy and the unsubstantial. But that has been the nature of the game, at least since the NCAA tournament became the monster of the sport, and since ESPN arrived on the scene to sensationalize everything. It is not likely to change any time soon.