Patrick Mills, You Star

The seven-month absence of college hoops in our lives is something that, while somewhat necessary, sucks. So I needed a sport to follow in the bright, skin-reddening summertime.

I've gradually soured on baseball for a variety of reasons to the point where I only watch select LCS and World Series games. The one MLB game I have attended in the last three years, a Rangers-Yankees game this past April, happened on the same night as two NBA playoff games. I felt for my friends, who were surely distracted by my constant use of binoculars to look at the TV's in the suites for score updates/live action.

Eventually, I turned to Aussie Rules Football, a sport I was turned on to a few years back by a lovely brunette foreign exchange student from Tasmania and before that by accident watching the now-defunct Fox Sports World channel one night. The clip at the beginning of this post is of that great sport.

After a summer of following the real AFL (please just go away arena football, you're wasting everyone's time and money with this drivel) and the fast-paced exciting game of Aussie Rules, it was in a word, cool, to see the best individual performance of the first month of the college basketball season come from an uber-talented Aussie in Patrick Mills. (Mills, who is from Canberra, probably grew up preferring rugby and rugby league [two different sports] to aussie rules, however.)

If you don't follow St. Mary's, or can't remember why you think you heard the name 'Patrick Mills' on Sportscenter about three weeks back, the freshman (yes, just a frosh) put up 37 against Oregon in just his fourth college game.

It's said that Mills is adored by the aboriginal Australian community, and if you've even so much as watched him play on TV in his young college career, you'll be able to see why.

Programming note: I'll be back later tonight with what I believe to be is the internet's first ever 'Hardly-Live Blog' of a game when my school, North Texas, plays at Texas in a game that is being played as I type.

(This was facilitated by two things: not enough people paying for the $35 bus and ticket package being offered by UNT athletics, and FSN Southwest picking up the game at the 11th hour, but on tape delay at 10:30 CT due to a hockey game 10 people will watch. [Damned state that cares more about football than hoops and damned televised hockey rights.])