Wisconsin sports turned down a strange and twisted path during the 2001-02 school year. They entered a world that turned precognition on its head and dropped unexpectedly into a netherworld of shaken perspectives and toppling corners.
The gloomy attic of UW’s mind state reveals a cavern of dark and mysterious stairwells, leading to unknown heights, precipitous depths and ambiguous nexuses.
Was the hazy experience drug-induced? The spinning-headed Badgers might be wondering the same thing.
Wisconsin’s young and impressionable football team began the strange odyssey. Loaded with underclassmen in crucial starting roles, the Badgers hesitated to move forward at all in the foreboding darkness. Early losses to Oregon and Fresno State set the team back as the first step creaked and moaned.
The volleyball team carried on unperturbed, however, thrust by the momentum of a national-finals appearance the year before. Sherisa Livingston and Lisa Zukowski carried the torch, lighting the way for a fabulous 18-1 start.
The men’s soccer team began startlingly, too, at 7-1, and Kalekeni Banda’s leadership finally seemed cemented. Banda was no stranger to a bumpy ride, but now that his system and players were firmly in place he seemed a fitting bearer to lead UW’s bizarre journey.
The light failed to illuminate a snag in the trail, however. Valentine Anozie and Zukowski tripped along the way. Reeling from knee injuries, they dropped from view into the chasm below. Only then did Wisconsin sports notice this obtuse cabin was missing either a floor or a ceiling and either extreme seemed possible for the adventure.
Meanwhile, the football team found itself coasting curiously sideways. Trading wins for losses, its plane of reference had shifted and it moved horizontally along the wall, staring wide-eyed from its suddenly foreign perspective.
Around one corner was its bowl-game goal; around another an unthinkable losing record. The flatlining team grasped at a rail to right itself, but it tipped the wrong way.
Brett Bell unwittingly covered a punt against Michigan, and a hard-fought win slipped into a devastating loss. The shock of the tumble kept UW from catching hold versus Minnesota the next week, and the football team veered out of sight into nothingness.
Volleyball continued to sail, but soccer, like its football offspring, failed to navigate a safe way. Banda’s boys choked in the Big Ten and suffocated in the first round of the conference tournament.
By now basketball had entered the stage, men’s and women’s teams leaping from opposite windows into the swirling, shifting room.
Bo Ryan and the men threatened to follow young football, as a galley of freshmen trepidatiously tiptoed onto the scene from a Hawaiian luau. The women brought a core of seniors but a history of disappointment from their jaunt to the Virgin Islands.
Floors and surfaces jumped out in different directions, the mutative house adapting to the complexity of UW’s competitive picture as fall and winter sports crowded the landscape.
In the chaos, the volleyball girls managed to reach higher than anyone else, planting their flag in the NCAA tournament — but without immortalizing themselves like their heroic predecessors. Wisconsin ducked out of view.
Women’s basketball walked all the way to a ceiling, swinging from chandeliers and jubilantly feasting on a non-conference cornucopia. Their ascent seemed to have sucked any gravity from the room, and they discovered they could tread upside down above the world with ease.
But when the girls set their feet, they realized then, at 17-1, the ceiling was false. There was further to climb but they could not reach it. When gravity returned, the team fell — seven losses in a row.
Nothing was real anymore. Ghosts from the fall floated up out of the deep.
Banda addressed an audience, which would have turned sheet-pale at the chilling specter had it not already been pure white. Then he disappeared.
Lee Evans floated up on behalf of the football team. “I’ll be back,” he boasted, seemingly guaranteeing that so would the team, to conquer the mystifying challenge next year.
As if to dampen the excitement, however, a third figure spoke then. Men’s hockey coach Jeff Sauer said this would be his last trek. That team was skating more or less unnoticed in the turbulent room, sharing its confusing perils and peaks.
Only one team managed to reach every surface in the place. Ryan’s basketball team leapt from floor to stair to wall like a versatile mountain goat, eyes on the top of the house and a postseason that had seemed unreachable.
The nimble young squad gelled, discovering the rope to the top that had eluded every other expedition. Jane Albright’s mouth watered as she craned her neck from a crooked stair, wondering whether she would make the playoffs.
Ryan didn’t wonder. He and Travon Davis ascended the confusing pyramid together and rose a trophy at its top. Basketball had survived the loss of two coaches, five seniors and four other players, but the light load made their travel up the overhanging layers easier.
After the climax, several teams stay on the field. Wisconsin’s rowers are among the best, though obscured by all the action indoors. Track has leapt hurdles too.
A wrestling team vaulted a few emerging stars to take the place of Donny Pritzlaff and, as the confusing, cluttered, kaleidoscopic tale ends and the curtain comes together, the softball team continues to split.
