Don't Buy a House: Catching Up with Minnesota Sports in 2,100 Words or Less

First rule of buying a house: Don't buy this tiny of a house.

On May 30th, my girlfriend and I closed on a house just east of the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. This was the culmination of a whirlwind month-long search to find a place we could afford in a nice neighborhood relatively close to where we worked. A couple dozen showings and open houses into our search, we found what would become our new house on the last day before we would have to switch our focus to rentals. It's a charming 3-bedroom with room for renovation in the finished upstairs and enough work done in the "unfinished" basement to host Vikings games and (heaven forbid) the occasional Minnesota playoff contest.

Snow Joke: The New Minnesota Twins and the End of an Absurdly Long Winter

After splitting a double-header with the Miami Marlins and their new manager “Red Dog” Redmond yesterday, your Minnesota Twins sit at 9-8 as the 2013 season nears the end of its first month. And the temperature finally hit 50 degrees in the Twin Cities today, only a month and three days after the start of spring and two days after the 4th or 5th measurable snow storm of April. Crews at Target Field had to hustle in order to clear Tuesday night’s snow from the field and stands to prepare the stadium for yesterday’s two-game docket. For those scoring at home, we have two professional sports teams in this state winning more than half their games AT THE SAME TIME!!! right now, the first time we can claim that since the fall of 1979.* Like the 2012 Vikings, this year’s Twins were almost unanimously picked to finish at or near the bottom of the AL Central this year, but they find themselves in an unexpectedly high spot in the division right now. They would be one game out of a playoff spot if the season ended today.**

*Not a correct statistic.
 **...That one checks out.

Closing (Tubby) Time: One Last Call for Basketball

Less than 24 hours after the Golden Gophers basketball team’s season-ending defeat in a 78-64 against a strong Florida Gators squad, Minnesota athletic director Norwood Teague flicked the lights off for the Tubby Smith Era of Gophers hoops.  The local media has approved the move for the most part, while the national folks have lamented the pink slip received by one of the good guys in college basketball and decried Teague’s and the program’s aspirations to become something more than a second-and-a-half-ish tier team in a big-time conference. Come on, they say. Count your blessings. You’re Minnesota. You’re located in the nation’s hinterlands, and you’re about as big a basketball powerhouse as McDonald’s is a place to get great ribs. You just fired the best thing you had going for you. 

You Down With PSP?: Firing Up the Postseason Success Predictor 8680

It’s now been about a year since the launch of Minnesota Sports Emporium. We will have a full Fiscal Year Recap in the next, oh I dunno, month or so (Who are you, our investors?? Hold your horses.) for as our winter extends into probably mid-April, so too does our collective writing hibernation instinct. If we posted articles at a more glacial pace than we already do, we’d probably have broken off the Arctic Ice Sheet, drifted southward and melted already (TERRIBLE GLOBAL WARMING PUN: PRE-EMPTIVE APOLOGY)!

This Was Supposed To Be The Winter of Sports!: or, Fun With Limericks

The world's first book o' limericks, penned by Edward Lear

(The following is a combination of truths and fictions relating to the origin of the limerick—a rhythmic, five-line poem structure—and the current states of affair for our local sports teams. Please consider all of the following limerick-related information in the same manner as you would any recent victory from any of our local squads: with a grain of salt and a swift retaliatory kick in the nether regions.)

MelAnChoLy in Minnesota Part IV: Reconstructive Surgery

Adrian Peterson tries out his reconstructed knee against the Jaguars. Find out how the folks at the Ligament Graveyard dealt with his amazing comeback season below.

John watched as the last of the contractors exited the graveyard. His gaze lingered as the gate swung shut slowly, and audibly. John took a deep, cold breath, satisfied that he was finally alone. His breath condensed into a vapor around him as he exhaled. He turned around to face the effigy of Al Harris that had been warming his back, and held out his hands close to the smoldering straw man as he tried to regain some feeling in his fingers. It was barely five in the evening, and the sun had already gone down; not unusual for this time of year in northern Minnesota. As his hands warmed up, John looked over at the massive limestone structure nearby, which until a few minutes before, had housed a half dozen independent contractors as they renovated the building. The contractors had just finished the final touches, and as head groundskeeper at Greenwood Cemetery in Virginia, MN, it was John’s duty to inspect the work done on the cemetery’s most brilliant mausoleum. 

Regression to the Lean: Reviewing a 96-Hour Pu Pu Platter

Tuesday, January 22
Nashville 3, Wild 1

Wednesday, January 23
Northwestern 55, Golden Gophers 48
Brooklyn 91, Timberwolves 83

Thursday, January 24
A Brief Respite

Friday, January 25
Detroit 5, Wild 3
Washington 114, Timberwolves 101

Saturday, January 26
Wisconsin 46, Golden Gophers 45
Charlotte 102, Timberwolves 101

As much as it sometimes seems like I revel in our sporting misery, I really don't like writing articles like this very much. They're much more cathartic than enjoyable, and there's no sense of a weight being lifted when the last keystroke has been hit and the last picture placed. But this was one remarkably awful week of sports for all of our most nationally relevant hometown teams, and a website that cites taking mediocrity to task as one of its stated motives for existence must give some kind of comment about the line of turds the Timberwolves, Wild, and Gophers guys basketball team have laid in one particularly trying 96-hour span.

Full Court Distress: A Running Diary of a Failure-Filled Thursday Night

Dan Barreiro asked his producer how much longer he had to hype the Minnesota-Michigan basketball game before it was scheduled to begin. Justin Gaard answered that he had about 14 minutes and change. At that moment, I pulled into the driveway of the house I share with Tony D and two other guys. One of those two is a tall blonde fellow named Tom. The following is a depressing and somewhat inaccurate narrative describing last night's major sporting events from Tom's and my perspective.