Whenever I fly somewhere, I always take a moment to examine the giant “departures” board, that airport staple doing its honest best to document every outbound flight on gigantic LED screens.
The concept of the board is a little dated in an era of digital boarding passes with links to a concourse map showing the every-300-feet Starbucks locations, and airline apps that send push notifications if a flight is delayed. In some ways, it’s also a relic of a pre-9/11 time when people were allowed to enter the terminal without a ticket; the departures board always used to be accompanied by an arrivals board, once the best and only way to know if a friend was going to make it on time.
There might not be a ton of practical reasons to study a departures board anymore, but that doesn’t mean it’s without allure. A Saturday morning check of Cleveland’s version revealed a flight to Chicago every 90 minutes or so. New York City? JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark were all represented. Fort Myers? Denver? Las Vegas? Cancun? St. Louis? Present as well.
It’s hard to avoid being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the thing. The departures board in Cleveland is just a tiny sample of the 45,000 or so daily commercial flights in the United States, bouncing between every major city (and some not-so-major ones) while carrying roughly three million travelers.
Naturally, an undertaking of that scale requires people to keep the machine running, specifically, legions of workers who have committed themselves to schedules and routines that would give the average 9-to-5er hives. It’s an underground secret society of air traffic controllers, pilots, customer service representatives, ground crew members, TSA agents, and baristas pledging to work relentless shifts at all hours, serving unending waves of people who would rather be somewhere else.
Thanks to them, along with staggering equipment and infrastructure investments, you truly can end up just about anywhere with an airport as your starting point.
It’s the same with basketball programs. Not in any literal sense, of course. Directors of basketball operations work very hard to make sure of that, including Ilan Kindler, whose Cornell men’s team shuffled behind me and down Hopkins’ Concourse C a few minutes after I left the departures board, through the haze between games at Kent State and Illinois State.
However, the early portion of any schedule offers that same sense of “this could end up anywhere” wonder.
That’s a universal truth, even for teams without 11 newcomers. Look no further than Cleveland State last season, a roster jam-packed with returners, including three past or future Horizon League Players of the Year. The Vikings were the odds-on conference title favorites from all corners, at least until Colbi Maples tore her ACL and threw everything out of alignment. CSU still had a successful season, though third place was, at best, a mixed bag, relative to those expectations.
Still, people will always try to make some sense of it all, to wrap their minds around thousands of variables, and declare that They Alone know the truth of the situation.
Cleveland State will be good because Maples is back and, despite a tumultuous offseason, they’ve consistently been good for the last six years. Cleveland State will be bad because their system depends heavily on continuity, and the Vikings don’t have any. And who are Paula Pique and Jada Leonard to replace the likes of Sara Guerreiro and Mickayla Perdue anyway?
Along the way, any morsels supporting one of the other are gobbled up by optimists, pessimists, or those subject to confirmation bias:
“Leonard had seven steals against Chicago State, the defense is back!”
“The Vikings struggled with a Fullerton team that went 7-23 last season and subsequently flushed out the program, it’s going to be a long year.”
It’s all nonsense.
Is Cleveland State good? I’ve attended the last 63 Vikings games, home, away, and other, and I can’t tell you right now. And though I don’t want to put words in Chris Kielsmeier’s mouth, my best guess is that he can’t either, at least not with any certainty that doesn’t rely on at least a couple of unknowns locking into place.
For now, all I can tell you is that on Sunday, the Vikings faced just about every sort of adversity imaginable and passed a significant test. Sure, plenty of it was self-inflicted, but at the end of it all, CSU won a game where it trailed by between eight and 12 points for most of the first half, and (according to ESPN Analytics) still stood an 80 percent chance of losing when trailing by three with two minutes remaining.
That result came despite a three-hour time difference, 32 turnovers, 37 free throws allowed, a “you literally never see this” technical foul assessed to the Vikings in the first quarter, and Maples’ foul trouble limiting her to less than three minutes of the second half. All for a team playing its second regular season game as a collective.
And, oh yeah, those hours spent in airports and on airplanes, as a traveling party of 26 data points among the millions with an interest in a departure board.
When will we know more than that? Obviously, every game is the opportunity to learn a little bit more, but in the most significant ways, the answers are going to be measured in months, not days.
Sure, airports are liminal spaces. But, at the same time, my trip to Fullerton lasted a total of 58 hours, and I spent 30 in airports, on planes, or in my uncomfortably-large rental SUV – all in the service of purposes that, generously, occupied eight hours total (counting the Anaheim Ducks game I caught before heading back to LAX). What’s life, and what are basketball seasons, if not sequences of liminal spaces punctuated by fleeting moments of arrival?
My best advice, at this stage, is to grab your favorite 4:30 a.m. beverage and enjoy the flight.
