Shirtdoku
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Life in the balance. It's a phrase that expresses a certain precarious uncertainty, implying that every upcoming result hangs on a knife-edge decision. When Cary Grant is mistaken for a spy in North by Northwest (1959) and chased across a field by a crop duster, his character's life is in the balance. Same with Three Days of the Condor (1975), where Robert Redford comes back from lunch to find everyone in the office dead. I sure do hope he survives the rest of the movie! (Spoiler alert: he does.) There are hundreds of thousands of real people alive today, in actual war zones, whose tomorrow depends on hundreds of tiny correct decisions. For the rest of us, our lives are never in the balance, and that's an everyday luxury to be thankful for. I ponder this every second week of November, because it's the start of the NCAA Division II basketball season. The D-II motto since the Mid-Majority days has been – you guessed it – that. If you're already a certified Dee Too pleasenjoyer, you don't need to be sold on it. If you aren't, this slogan could come off sounding like you or your dog might die if you don't buy in. The most compelling aspect of Division II is that it isn't Division I: no back-and-forth eligibility injuctions, no jersey patches, and no Dick Vitale. The most commercial it gets down here is the occasional dumb conference tournament title sponsorship. Otherwise, the experience involves a lot of single-camera setups, one-man announcer booths with bad sound levels, and FloHoops streams that crash randomly. Anyway, basketball. Before the season starts in earnest on Monday (November 9), ten of the best men's teams have gathered at the George W. Jenkins Field House on the Florida Southern College campus in Lakeland, Florida. The Small College Basketball Hall of Fame Classic has defending national champion Gannon, runner-up Oklahoma Baptist, and eight teams that made regionals in 2025-26. "This field is loaded! Division II basketball fans rejoice!" Five games on Saturday, five games on Sunday, all streaming for free? That's what's up. Saturday's best game was a rematch of a national quarterfinal between Oklahoma Baptist and Cal State East Bay. Last year, OBU ended East Bay's 33-0 season, and this time they almost came back from a 15-point hole but lost by two. They also have a 7-foot-2, 371-lb. guy named Erik Madrid who wears the same ridiculous black-rimmed glasses that I wear. So watch Division II basketball, or you'll die. (You will anyway, just not anytime soon.)

Scenes From The Ball Game is out and available now.

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