Updated throughout the day with quick takes from staff.
If your play in the NCAA Tournament is 30% inspired and 70% inept, you will probably not beat an 8-seed. That's roughly how it played out for Louisville on Friday night, and Cardinals fans are left to watch a phenomenal Kentucky team play its way through the tournament.
The Louisville-Kentucky rivalry is one of the fiercest in college basketball. The two fan bases regularly refer to the other team's players as thugs, often because they have tattoos (!), and they delight in bashing the moral integrity of the other team's coach. It's a lot like most other historic sports rivalries, in that it's really dumb.
Generally speaking, I'm alone here. Just about everyone -- including nearly all of my friends who root for either U of L or UK -- resent my simple but honest admission that I like both the Cards and the Cats. I promise I'm not trolling, and I'm not trying to be a contrarian. I firmly believe that there is nothing wrong with liking both teams, just as there's nothing wrong with liking both the Cubs and the White Sox.
When pressed, fans who subscribe to the "pick a side" mentality will almost invariably tell me that I "don't get it." I don't begrudge a fan's right to hate any team they so choose, but if you hate your team's rival, you should probably ask yourself whether you "get it." Why do you hate the team you hate? Is it a decision you came to independently, or are you just toeing the line along with your fellow fans?
Welcome to the world of sports, where "I like everybody" is a blasphemous statement.
(For further reading: this sentiment is somewhat related to Free Darko's tenet of "liberated fandom.")
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