Monday has earned the reputation of generally being a terrible day, and rightly so. School and work start up on the day’s first week, the weekend is barely visible from it, and The Bachelor comes on at night. That’s already a trifecta of suckiness right there, and it wasn’t that hard to come up with.
However, for Maryland basketball fans, this past Monday, Feb. 1, was far better than your average Monday. Sure, The Bachelor still came on, but cast that aside and think of your average Monday. Then subtract all the sadness from it, throw in some wonderfully good fortune, and you get this most recent Monday. It truly was a day to remember for those who support the university’s men’s basketball team — and for all the right reasons, which is usually not the case for the week’s opener.
Here are three such reasons.
1) The Terps jumped up four spots in the newest AP Top 25 poll and now reside in the No. 4 spot behind Villanova, North Carolina and Oklahoma. The move comes on the heels of the team’s first signature win of the season last Thursday over Iowa.
2) Speaking of heels, the Tar Heels of UNC just so happened to lose to Louisville on Monday, which could cause them to fall in the polls next time around and has possibly opened the door for another slight step upward for Mark Turgeon’s team should it have another solid week.
3) And finally, Duke fell to — wait, where’s Duke? Oh, that’s right, the Blue Devils didn’t even make the Top 25 on Monday, the first time they haven’t done so in 167 editions of the list. That stinks. Just kidding. It doesn’t stink.
So, essentially, Maryland made a leap into the country’s top five, North Carolina, a former ACC rival, lost a crucial game, and Duke, another former ACC rival, made headlines for something it didn’t do as opposed to something it did. Are we sure yesterday wasn’t a Friday, or a Saturday, or at least a really strong Wednesday? Because it certainly didn’t feel like a normal Monday for Terps fans.
