Drag a player from the roster to an unfilled square. A square can be reset by double-clicking or tapping it. Fill up the grid. When the jersey digits across the rows and down the columns add up to the same Magic Number, you win!
Philadelphia's Palestra – or as I used to call it, a great place to crash – is one hundred years old this year. It's the centennial for the Cathedral of College Basketball, a place where I once had a non-paying temp job. I was still in college when it was seventy-five years old, as a fair number of you were. The Palestra just is, hasn't really improved much in our lifetimes, and accepts as much new technology as its fragile steel ribcage can handle. I'm thinking specifically about the lamp-matrix scoreboard and letter-track reader board from "my day", which fans in the 1950s must have complained about as much as I did when the Alan Aufzien Family Videoboard was installed in 2011. (Out: BOOBA, in: BON and POS.) I haven't been back in town to catch a game since then, but I have ESPN Plus and a flatscreen television, so I can sort of be there from six timezones away. The media department still puts "Quaker Notemeal" in the agate, the building still murmurs like late-night Schuylkill Expressway traffic when it's three-quarters empty, and Pantone still can't reproduce the exact whitish-yellow of that court under those lights. I'm guessing that the concession stands are still a 50-50 lottery: will your pretzel be soft and chewy, or tough like tree bark? Anyway, basketball. Howard, last seen beating UMBC for its first NCAA Tournament win* in program history, lost super-scorer Bryce Harris to the G League but scored 15 of the first 16 points at Penn the other night anyway. That's pretty much all the Bison had, the Quakers won going away, so there was plenty of time to contemplate the arena – which was also hosting a Charlotte-Seton Hall game that night, the kind of random intersectional doubleheader that happened all the time back when SFTBG protagonist Ned Irish was managing things. None of us have aged quite as gracefully as The Palestra has, and maybe two or three of us will end up surviving a century. Doesn't that make you feel just a little bit uncomfortable?
