Like most mid-majors who come to Louisville for a non-conference tussle in December, history will not be on the side of Louisiana-Lafayette Wednesday night. The Ragin' Cajuns have faced the Cardinals seven times and lost seven times, with five of those defeats coming inside the vaunted walls of Freedom Hall.

A program winless against U of L doesn't demand much space in the collective mind of the Cardinal fan base, but a little under five years ago Lafayette was just a couple of shots away from drastically altering the current perception of both Louisville basketball and the man who leads it.

When the topic of the 2005 Final Four run comes up, invariably U of L fans will bring up the West Virginia miracle comeback first, then move on to the dismantlings of Georgia Tech and top seed Washington, and then finally they'll discuss the loss in the national semifinals to eventual runner-up Illinois. What's rarely discussed and seems to be largely forgotten is that the Cards were nearly one-and-done for the second time in as many years.

Still fuming from a perceived seeding slight by the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee, Louisville, ranked No. 3 in the country but remarkably seeded fourth in the West, nearly proved their critics correct in their big dance opener.

Louisiana-Lafayette, the 13th-seeded champions of the Sun Belt, withstood a barrage of early Francisco Garcia threes and trailed the Cards by just a point at intermission. Led by future NBA Draft pick Tiras Wade, the Ragin' Cajuns would later go on a 15-8 run and take a four-point lead with under ten minutes play. They held a one-point advantage with under four minutes to go and had a chance to tie the game in the final minute, but perfection from Garcia at the free-throw line (7-for-7) ultimately put the upset out of reach.

"I knew when we had this matchup, it was going to come down to the last two minutes," Pitino said afterward. "We told them that at halftime that the last two minutes is our time. We are a veteran basketball team, but so are they. They are a very, very good basketball team. We are proud of this victory."

In hindsight, it's a victory Pitino ought to cherish.

Let's look at how the head coach's legacy is altered if the Cajuns knock down just a couple more jumpers on that evening:

--No more talk of being the only coach to take three different programs to the Final Four.

--Pitino's first five seasons at Louisville would have gone NIT, second round loss, first round loss, first round loss, NIT.

--Each of Pitino's first three NCAA Tournament losses would have come against non-BCS conference teams, and two of them would have come at the hands of double-digit seeds (No. 12 Butler upset Louisville in '04).

--The amount of scrutiny Pitino would have been forced to endure during the NIT season of '05-'06 would have been enormous.

--Even now, after back-to-back Elite 8 losses, there would be considerable talk about Pitino never being able to get over the hump at U of L.

It's amazing how one or two 40-minute games in late March can completely shape the legacy of a head basketball coach. We aren't that far removed from a time when the knock on Roy Williams was that he'd "never be able to win the big one." Hell, I vividly remember hearing a man say "well they'll hang 'em if he loses this one" in reference to Pitino when Kentucky trailed San Jose State late in the first half of their opening contest in the '96 tournament.

It's a strange, strange game.

There's not a great deal to be said that hasn't already been covered at this point. Saturday was easily the most complete and encouraging performance this group has given to date.

The fact that it came against a team that was unexpectedly forced to suit up without one of their top players sullied it just a tad, but Western doesn't come close to beating the Louisville team that showed up on Saturday even with a completely healthy Sergio Kerusch.

It was nice to see everyone smiling and cutting lose after what has definitely been a difficult couple of weeks. The chemistry this team possesses makes it particularly easy to support. It isn't hard to see just how much these guys care about each other and how much they want one another to succeed.

Still, you have to hope everyone's aware that one excellent performance doesn't erase what happened against Western Carolina and Charlotte, and that these guys have a pretty large hole to dig themselves out of. There's still a significant amount of work to be done.

Something that was said to him over the course of the past week apparently got through to Samardo. For the first time in 13 or 14 months he actually looked happy to be playing the game of basketball. He smiled, he rebounded, he attacked the rim and he went nuts when his teammates made plays. It was the Samardo Samuels Louisville has to have to be any sort of player in the Big East this year.

I'm not 100% sure, but it looked like at one point in the game you could see him say "I'm back" as he was walking off the floor. Very encouraging.

Team evaluation of Jerry Smith's performance:

Edgar Sosa. So hot right now.

I'm not going to say anything else because I don't want to taint whatever mojo he's got working in his favor.

It looks like this is the rotation Pitino has settled on. So far, so good, but thoughts of Swop playing 25 minutes against Connecticut, Georgetown, West Virginia, etc. are giving me night terrors.

With extra minutes sent their way, I thought Reggie Delk and Kyle Kuric were both terrific, the latter in particular. Both guys can defend, both can hit the outside shot with some degree of consistency, both can help out on the glass (especially Kuric) and both are more capable of creating shots for other other guys than anyone on the team outside of the point guards.

It wasn't TJ's best overall performance, but all of the sudden he's become a guy who you know is going to give an extreme effort night in, night out. He runs the floor exceptionally well and he's really become a battler in the paint for position both when he wants the ball and when a shot is in the air.

There are some people who just can't bring it in practice. They really do try, but in their subconscious they know that it's not as important as an actual game and therefore their effort and demeanor simply aren't at the level they are when the stadium's full and a notch in the win column is on the line. You have to assume this is the case with Jennings.

Preston.

Chris Brickley levitating at some point during the game is just about the only thing I would have assigned worse odds to than Samardo Samuels cramming a poorly-thrown alley-oop in mid-air with his left hand.

Speaking of Brickley, he may be the most loved walk-on (by his teammates) in the history of Louisville basketball. The team had obviously planned to not celebrate at all if he scored a point, and the bench reaction, or lack thereof, when he netted the first of his two buckets was priceless. Of course about 30 seconds later I was worried that Sosa and Smith were going to break an ankle and have a heart attack at the same time due to their celebration. It's pretty cool to see.

The official who bumped McDonald ought to be suspended. That's a rule that has to work both ways. If you're going to throw the book at players and coaches who make any sort of intentional contact with a ref, then you have to do the same to a stripe who goes out of his way to get in the face of someone else during a game.

Mike Marra's going to be pretty good. I'm telling you. Give it a year or so.

I think you're starting to see the ill-effects of not setting the world on fire as a freshman get to Peyton Siva just a bit. He's never a guy who's going to openly pout or give a half-assed effort because he doesn't think he's getting enough playing time, but consistently playing less than 20 minutes and scoring in single figures is going to take its toll on any kid who had been THE guy on his team for his entire life up until this point.

Don't get me wrong, I think Peyton's 100% aware and OK with the fact that this is Edgar Sosa's year to run the show, but being that mature doesn't automatically make stomaching such a drastic transition any easier.

All that said, how many former McDonald's All-Americans averaging just over 13 minutes a game do you see behaving like this on the bench?

He's absolutely going to be a star here.

Stephen Van Treese's inbound turnover to minutes played ratio might be the worst in the history of college basketball.

George Goode: No one's rocked the sweater/glasses combo harder since Cosby. Man can dress. And block shots. And read Card Chronicle.

If you missed any of the game, here's a really well put together highlight video.

Well done, AnVillen.

Which one of you all is going to pick me up off the ground, dry my tears and carry me out of Freedom Hall on Senior Day?

All pics via The C-J.

All right fellas, this is The Bill, and we don't lose The Bill. Except for the one year where we lost The Bill.

Stayin' with the hot hand.

GO CARDS

--Spread check: Louisville by 10.

--Playing in Freedom Hall is a huge deal for Western star A.J. Slaughter.

"He had every kind of Louisville shirt you could find," Bonita Slaughter says of her son.

While he worked to develop the basketball skills that eventually made him an All-State player at Shelby County, A.J. sometimes imagined himself winning games in Freedom Hall like his favorite Cardinals players, Reece Gaines and Francisco Garcia.

On Saturday, Slaughter will finally live his fantasy. He will be wearing red in Freedom Hall when Louisville plays Western Kentucky University.

Of course, a little boy's dream has long since taken a detour.

Slaughter will be in the visiting uniform of WKU on Saturday. His goal will be to replicate the beat-down he and Western put on Rick Pitino's Cardinals a year ago.

--Preston's ready.

"They're not very big, but they're very skilled, like Steffphon Pettigrew and Jeremy Evans," Knowles said. "They do a great job of not letting you get the ball in the post. They want to take you out of plays, kind of like UNLV did."

WKU has won three straight — including a 76-69 win over then-No.24 Vanderbilt — after a 2-3 start.

"We've been turning the corner in general," WKU coach Ken McDonald told The Associated Press. "The last couple times out we've just been playing better, defending better and taking some pressure off our offense."

It prompted Pitino to label the Toppers "the best team our fans have seen this year," and he added, "Western's a major team like Gonzaga's a major team, like Xavier's a major team."

Knowles said the Cards need a major effort to prevent another loss to the Hilltoppers.

"Our main thing is just us coming out and being the more physical team and just getting assertive from the get-go," he said. "Just let them know that we're here, and we're going to play them hard for 40 minutes."

--The 'Tops are expecting a U of L squad hellbent on revenge.

"Guys in that locker room aren’t going to let their teammates forget that we got them last year and we’ve got to be ready for that," McDonald said. "We’ve got to be ready for that environment. They’re going to come out swinging and we have to handle that.

"We’ve got to go in with an ‘us against the world’ mentality, because we haven’t been in this type of environment yet. It’ll be louder than we’re used to and we have a chance to do something special."

Aside from the fact the Hilltoppers (5-3) knocked off Louisville (6-3) last season, the Cardinals figure to be fired up today simply because they’ve already suffered two disappointing home losses this season - to Charlotte and Western Carolina.

But the Hilltoppers say they can’t worry about that. They aren’t concerning themselves with last season’s game and they’re not losing sleep about how Louisville has played this year, either.

"We know they’re going to be fired up because of last year, so we’ve just got to be ready to play," Pettigrew said. "We can only care about how we play and get ready to handle everything they’re going to throw at us. We’ve got to be ready."

--Both squads are in need of some resume boosting before heading into conference play.

--WKU game notes.

Check out the video interview of Edgar Sosa that Rick Bozich has on his blog. The blog post is about Sosa's three-point shooting, but the interview is mostly about how the team keeps in contact with past players. Also, George Goode in the background makes me laugh.

Bobby Knight on Kentucky and Calipari:

"We've gotten into this situation where integrity is really lacking and that's why I'm glad I'm not coaching. You see we've got a coach at Kentucky who put two schools on probation and he's still coaching. I really don't understand that."

Enjoy the 90,000 poorly-worded emails, coach.

I've heard multiple stories of how Samardo Samuels allows small problems that shouldn't be that big of a deal dominate his psyche for extended periods of time, and the following quote from this morning's story in the C-J certainly reinforces those stories.

"I was so mad like I didn't know what to do with myself — I started thinking this basketball stuff isn't for me," Samuels said. "It was bad. That was one of the lowest points I ever got to in my basketball career."

I think this is probably the biggest reason we've seen Pitino be so reluctant to leave Terrence Jennings in the game for long stretches of time. TJ can handle being on the bench, Samardo can't.

Because they play basketball at a major program, it's easy to forget that the players we talk about are also just college kids. Everyone who goes to college matures, and while the biggest jump in growth for most ususally comes at some point during their first year or early in their second, for others it's not until a little bit later.

Samardo's a kid who's trying to learn the game of basketball while under a tremendous amount of pressure. Growth will come, it just might take a little more time than some were expecting.

We now know who Louisville's second opponent will be for the 2010 football season. The Cards will host Eastern Kentucky on Sept. 11.

DeMarcus Smith was on 790 WKRD yesterday and stated that he had moved Oregon to No. 1 on his wish list before Steve Kragthorpe was fired and Charlie Strong was hired.

I. LOVE. THIS. MAN.

Major congratulations to Brock Bolen who was activated from the practice squad by the Jacksonville Jaguars earlier this week and actually started last night's game against the Colts at fullback.

Sports Illustrated is getting into the end of the decade spirit and has released its top ten college football upsets of the 2000's. Checking in at No. 6: Louisville's take down of Florida State in 2002.

Cardinal third baseman Phil Wunderlich has been named a preseason third team All-American by the National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association.

The boys need you to jump higher than ever, Alvin.

GO CARDS

SPOILER: ORU wins.

The Golden Eagles' 6-5 record isn't particularly impressive, but they've played at Wake Forest and Virginia, and won at Stanford on Nov. 18.

More substantive preview on the way.

SECOND SPOILER: Ken Tutt finally graduated.

After 15 years on the Louisville football coaching staff, Greg Nord is headed to Illinois where he will coach the tight ends. He had spent time coaching both the tight ends and running backs at U of L, and was the current recruiting coordinator.

In Champaign, Nord will be re-united with former Cardinal offensive coordinator Paul Petrino, who reportedly signed on as a member of Ron Zook's staff last night.

Best of luck to Coach Nord at Illinois.