Hard Miles

At roughly 9:00 PM on New Year’s Day, I collapsed on to a queen bed in room 105 of a Motel 6 in Elkhart, IN. I was nauseous, lightheaded, and terrified of the possible explanations for those occasionally-recurring symptoms.

A Red Wings game and a couple podcasts kept me mentally online as much as required to navigate my car those four hours from home. But then, lying in silence, I was awash in my own thoughts, none of them offering much relief. The embrace of whatever invisible force pushes me past the point of rationality while following a mid-major basketball team around the midwest and, occasionally, to San Juan or Los Angeles was nowhere to be found. Why is this happening again? What’s wrong with me? Will I feel better in the morning?

And then: Do I even want to do this anymore? Why am I putting myself through agony? What if I turned around and went home right now?

During the uncontrollable mudslide, I remembered that I had spent a night in that very same Motel 6 roughly six weeks earlier.

That was a different day in the figurative sense, too. Then, high on caffeine and vibes, I reluctantly made an unplanned stop in Elkhart around midnight after Cleveland State’s loss at Northwestern. I cranked out a post about the near-miss against a Big Ten foe at 3:00 AM, took a two-hour nap, drove the rest of the way home for a much-needed shower (I didn’t have an overnight bag with me), then triumphantly headed down to Kent State to watch the Vikings men’s team.

Rob Summers’ guys got shelled that afternoon, but I still felt like I had won. Because travel is absurdly repetitive, I’ve taken to developing increasingly insane challenges for myself that typically involve longer trips, less sleep, and more events. Making it to KSU, with my faculties reasonably intact, and roughly 15 hours after covering a game 400 miles away, meant that I had passed my little self-imposed test.

The notion of repetition stuck with me more than usual, once I woke up and felt much better, as I continued along to Green Bay.

Sometimes repetition can be fun. Along I-43 near Sheboygan, there’s a behemoth of an American flag flying in front of Acuity Insurance’s headquarters. Signage legible at 70 MPH lets motorists know that the banner measures 70 feet by 140 feet, and is attached to a claimed world record 400-foot pole (Wikipedia says that it’s actually only the 22nd tallest on the globe, though the clear leader among poles attached to Old Glory). On my annual drive-by, the sight is enough to elicit a “yep, there that is again, pretty wild.”

Not much further along, there’s an exit for a village named Cleveland, ominously fed by County Highway XX. I chuckled, then remembered that I’ve already used that in a lede for a game story, so doing it again is probably out of the question.

On other occasions, it’s a bit more monotonous. In Titletown, I stayed at the usual Super 8 and ate the usual Dave’s Hot Chicken. That was followed by another Motel 6 outside of Milwaukee, with Qdoba for dinner, and whatever local sporting event I could find on the day off in between CSU’s two Wisconsin games. At each arena, upon my arrival, I posted the same eight photos as I do every year.

Lingering too long on those similarities can bring on another wave of intrusive thoughts though.

Sunday morning in Oak Creek, WI found me working on a weekly power rankings post inside the very same Starbucks where I wrote about our 2022-23 postseason award winners. Somehow, I’ve gone everywhere in the last three years, yet nowhere at the same time.

If only they were all that innocuous.

Back in the car, I gassed up at the Speedway where I once looked my elderly dogs in the eyes and said, out loud, “I’m sorry for doing this to you.” I heard the same Eminem song that played on the way to a bittersweet party in Morgantown, WV when my high school girlfriend dumped me for the last time. Drove the same stretch of I-294 outside of Chicago that led to my then-gig at a Robert Morris Illinois hockey game, just 48 hours after fainting in a room at the Cleveland Clinic, when a doctor told me that my wife wouldn’t survive the day.

I also passed the exit for I-55. Over New Year’s in 2017, that highway was a key leg of a hazy triangular trip connecting the Windy City to St. Louis, to watch a defenseman from my Penn State team try out for Team USA, where she eventually captained the squad to a bronze medal at the World University Games. I cruised past Indiana Dunes, a highlight of my summer bike rides. Then I fired up Christina Milian’s AM to PM to keep the energy high on the road, just as I did on my overnight trips home from college to use half of my dad’s pair of Browns season tickets.

Like I said, everywhere and nowhere. I’ve experienced a lot of life on the margins, but fundamentally, I’ve been doing most of the same things for 15 years, with the teams and sports almost reduced to incidental details. There’s very little novelty in any of it anymore.

The bad memories are inextricably linked with “I should’ve handled that a lot differently” regret, as with my dogs and wife. But even the good ones make me wonder why things, absent any personal tragedy, always seem just a little bit deflated in the present moment, despite it all being perfectly okay in some broad, superficial sense.

Why am I even thinking about the past at all?

At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, or losing perspective, that’s how watching Cleveland State women’s basketball feels these days. Everything’s kind of fine for a team that will probably win 20 or more games for the sixth straight non-COVID season, yet also kind of worse than before.

The Chris Kielsmeier-era Vikings, of course, are a program burdened by its recent, ultra-successful, past. CSU’s current overall mark, 12-5, would have been cause for celebration in 1986 (final record: 6-20), 1996 (11-16), 2006 (4-24), or 2016 (9-20).

In 2026, though, it’s fodder for a “what’s wrong with this team” column. That much, to some extent, is inevitable on the heels of a five-year run where the Vikings hung banners for a pair of conference titles, along with the 2021 Women’s Basketball Invitational, and experienced several other close calls. It’s not really fair, but neither is life.

Go to Green Bay, and it’s impossible to avoid recalling numerous top-of-the-table battles with the Phoenix, including the 2023 contest that turned into a de facto Horizon League regular season championship game. The Vikings lost that day, but got revenge a couple weeks later in Indianapolis, clinching a place in March Madness. Last Friday’s game in the Kress Center brought, essentially, another elimination from the standings chase – in early January, instead of late February.

Gaze towards the end of the court to the right from the media table in Milwaukee’s Klotsche Center, and it’s easy to visualize Carmen Villalobos’ three that clinched a victory over the Panthers on New Year’s Day in 2024. That result was vital to the Vikings eventually capturing the first HL regular season crown in school history, but also just one of four consecutive gritty wins at UWM, a streak that began concurrently with Cleveland State becoming a bona fide title contender.

On Sunday, though, that fixture produced, arguably, the worst loss in recent CSU history.

Those who don’t obsessively follow the Vikings might point to the obvious: a roster that was battered by the spring’s transfer portal departures. That strikes me as a bit of a lazy explanation.

Jada Leonard might not score quite as naturally as Mickayla Perdue, but she’s twice the defender. Destiny Leo’s three-point shooting is probably missed to some extent, but some combination of Sarah Hurley, Paula Pique, and Ella Van Weelden is capable of her production. Same for Izabella Zingaro and her closest one-for-one comparison, Jordana Reisma.

There’s also the matter of Colbi Maples’ return, after missing nearly all of last season.

No, talent isn’t the issue.

Untalented rosters, simply put, don’t beat a top-100 College of Charleston team on a neutral court, nor do they come within a couple free throws of beating Green Bay on the road. At the same time, great teams don’t lose to this year’s version of Milwaukee, or a Detroit Mercy squad that went on to punt one against an NAIA opponent a few weeks later.

What is this year’s Cleveland State? A spectacular reloading effort and a continuation of the Vikings’ recent run? Or a surface-level decent team, but one that mostly stands in contrast with the ghosts of the past?

“To be determined, right?” Kielsmeier offered after the UWM loss. “I mean, I can’t answer that right now, because in Puerto Rico you saw a team fight and lay everything on the line to go win a game, and beat a really good basketball team that’s probably going to win their league, probably going to go to the NCAA Tournament. And then you saw what you saw this week.”

“The answer is to be determined, and we’re going to have an opportunity to show who we really are.”

If a guy who has won 580 college basketball games doesn’t know right now, what hope do the rest of us have?

The only way forward is to sleep it off, wake up with the promise of a better tomorrow, and do your best to proceed down that familiar road.