The Way to Overcome Nostalgia Is to Get Out of the Way

Know when to let go.

This week, I wrote a piece for The Athletic making the argument that college basketball is better than it has ever been. If you are someone who has been watching college basketball your entire life, like I have, this is, frankly, a pretty obvious thing to say. The quality of play is unquestionably at a higher level than ever before, thanks to stylistic improvements in the sport on a strategic level and, mostly, the best young players in the world and the United States flocking to the sport as preparation for the NBA, an alternate to it, or both. (NCAA Basketball, in both men’s and women’s, is now the second-best basketball league on the planet, something it hasn’t been for decades.) The sport has the same inherently irresistible foundations it always has — raucous arena atmospheres, the charm of college town loyalties, that perfect, sacred bracket — but has added to them massive skill upgrades, entirely because of the business realities of the NIL era and the ability of these schools (and, really, their alumni) to pay to bring the best non-NBA players from all over the planet to their campuses, a level of play that is exciting and incredibly high-level. I enjoyed watching Deon Thomas make six pivots in the lane before finally muscling up a semi-hook shot as everybody elbowed each other in the face for a rebound as…