When I’m driving, particularly if I’m traversing a lengthy stretch of American Nothing at 7:00 AM on a Saturday, I’ll often study the other vehicles on the road and wonder where they’re going. The truckers, of course, are headed wherever their freight is needed. Occasionally, a trailer carrying horses or dirt bikes will turn up to offer a helpful clue. Mostly, though, it’s a futile question.
That Subaru in the next lane could be on the way to see a grandparent. Perhaps the destination is a long-distance Bumble match. Or a Renaissance faire. Maybe an out-of-state concert. Conceivably, the driver could be a college coach on the way to visit a program-transforming talent. The possibilities are fascinating to consider, even if they never progress beyond that.
Ultimately, there’s only one vehicle on the road with a destination I can identify with absolute certainty. The maroon Chrysler with the damaged front end (the result of rear-ending someone with a trailer hitch near Robert Morris two years ago) is headed to Oxford, Ohio to watch Miami University play a basketball game against Northern Illinois.
Though, to be honest, I have no idea why it’s going there.
NIU, of course, announced a couple weeks ago that it’s joining the Horizon League for the 2026-27 season. In time, I’ll certainly have ample opportunity to distract myself with the other cars on I-80, then find a favorite restaurant near campus, where I’ll undoubtedly pick up my phone and argue with someone about whether DeKalb counts as “Chicago.” If I play my cards right in that debate, and impress the newest HL member with how much I care, maybe some overworked DOBO will leave me a hot dog or pizza in the Convocation Center press box.
The present day, a year and a half removed from all of that, is quite a different story. NIU, with a 6-11 record in their current Mid-American Conference, failed to qualify for league tournament so, win or lose, Saturday was the end of the line for the 2024-25 Huskies. Miami, on the other hand, was securely within the MAC’s top eight and had concerns extending into the following week and, they hope, beyond.
It was, objectively, a pretty unimportant game in the grand scheme of things.
If nothing else, I figured, I was taking a trip into my past. Going to Miami also allowed me to take in an MU men’s hockey game, played in an arena where my Penn State women’s ACHA team upset the defending national champion RedHawks ten years and six weeks ago. When Max Dukovac gave the home team an early, but ill-fated, 1-0 lead on the power play, I thought the mechanics looked a lot like Madison Smiddy’s game winner. Then again, most things that happen in hockey games now look a lot like something from back then to me.
About 20 miles north of Oxford is Eaton, a dot-on-the-map town along I-70. I still stop at the Pilot outside of Eaton for gas and coffee whenever I pass on the way to Indianapolis, a silent homage to the nights I spent there between weekend hockey games at Miami, a time when I had more enthusiasm than money. Nearby, there’s a Walmart where I’d take aimless laps through departments, mostly to burn out the minutes until daybreak.
The pregame laps I take around basketball arenas away from the Wolstein Center are much more purposeful: four photos of the outside and four photos of the inside for social posts, and hopefully, enough visual material passing through my eyes to create some sort of lasting memory of the place.
Millett Hall is gorgeous and instantly became one of my favorites, with lighting, heavily-padded seats, and carpeted aisles that evoke a theater. It also reminds me a little bit of Credit Union 1 Arena, a place most still recognize as the UIC Pavilion, with its angular horseshoe bowl. I suppose that’s a nice bit of symmetry between the Horizon League’s two most recent membership changes.
But wait, no – I constantly needed to interrupt my thoughts – Millett Hall is Miami’s arena. It has nothing to do with anything. The RedHawks aren’t joining the HL, and NIU’s home court is five hours away.
Maybe the game itself would offer a few answers.
Northern Illinois had a highly credible inside-out flow working, between post player Brooke Stonebraker and guards Chelby Koker and Sidney McCrea. That, and some hot shooting (NIU began the game 8-for-13 from the floor and 5-for-7 from three-point range), were enough to give the Huskies a surprising 24-18 lead at the end of the first quarter against an outstanding Miami defense.
They were not enough, however, to overcome the 29 points the RedHawks compiled thanks to 26 NIU turnovers. That scoring fueled Miami runs to, first, pull the game even early in the second quarter, then, after halftime, create a slight bit of separation.
How much of that is of value to someone drawn to the game through an interest in the Horizon League? Basically, none of it. For one thing, Koker, McCrea, and Stonebraker, all graduate students and fifth-years, were playing their final games. Even perpetually-.500 head coach Lisa Carlsen, who has been at Northern Illinois for a decade, isn’t a drop-dead lock to make it to the HL. If she does, younger players like Lexi Carlsen (her daughter) and Brooke Blumenfeld could conceivably remain as well, though the transfer portal has rendered those sorts of projections foolish.
So, again, why was I there?
I thought, for a fleeting moment, that basketball was a distraction from my true purpose, a Miami-Northern Kentucky softball game across the street. After all, a guy in an NIU shirt stumbled over to the diamond just behind me and declared that he was witnessing history in the making. I didn’t ask for clarification, preferring to assume that he meant that a team from the Huskies’ present conference was taking on a school from their future home.
Then, I mentally slipped back inside Millett Hall and considered the aftermath of the RedHawks’ 89-79 victory. The Northern Illinois players, particularly those whose careers had just ended, lingered on the court for a sequence of tearful hugs, and to delay taking the first steps towards the rest of their lives as much as possible.
Maybe I was meant to bear witness, like a guest at a funeral for someone they had just met a few weeks ago. I’d never heard of Koker until I began investigating NIU’s program on the news of its move to the Horizon League, but beginnings and endings are always consequential events to a writer, and I soon took a great interest in her career. Not just the 1,926 points and 448 assists, both top-five numbers in program history, but the 15 years of solitary shots in dark gyms and “I can’t, I have basketball” that led to those gaudy stats.
One day, usually after the final buzzer of a nothing game in the middle of nowhere, it all abruptly ends, and no matter who the player is or what they accomplished, I try to pay my respects to that moment. After all, there may be plenty ahead, but there’s an awful lot behind too.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t that deep. Maybe it was a hello, not a goodbye. Maybe it was a casual first date with a school I know close to nothing about, beyond its impressively-frequent football upsets. Maybe it was a fun little side quest on the way to Indianapolis for the HL tournament, something different before taking on the sameness that dominates so much of my work – the same teams, the same arenas, the same content, the same food.
Whatever it is, or was, I can’t wait to do it again in DeKalb.
