Right now, as you’re reading this, I request that you go to Spotify and put on a song, “Face Down in the Moment” by Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats. And put it on repeat as you read this.

So…

Dear UCLA Basketball,

You know I love you, and even though it didn’t end up the way we wanted, you still didn’t break my heart.

My heart is intact.

Yeah, there were things that I was disappointed in. But my heart is full.

How could you ever think about saying goodbye to guys like Jaime Jaquez, Tyger Campbell and David Singleton and not have your heart full? As a sports fan, you have your teams you root for, but it’s always so much better of an experience when the teams and players you root for embody something you believe in. That’s these guys.

David Singleton. A guy who doesn’t have NBA athleticism. Who isn’t naturally a great defender. Playing for a coach in Mick Cronin that demands you play defense or you won’t get on the court. So he turned himself into a high-level defender. On a team that isn’t a great shooting team, he turned himself into a lights-out shooter. When the team needed leadership, he grew into being the team’s leader. Singleton leading the huddle before every game wasn’t planned, it just happened organically because of who he is. He has no real future as a basketball player, and probably should have got on with his life after last season when he had graduated. But he signed on for one more additional year to try and enable this team to win a national championship. That’s the purest form of the spirit of sports right there, embodied in this young man.

Tyger Campbell. While you might think that the spirit animal for Cronin in his first four years at UCLA is Jaquez, his extension of himself on the court is Campbell. And really, none of this could have been done without that. I’ve watched UCLA practice, and there are so many times when Cronin starts to give an instruction, say, what offensive set he wants run, and he doesn’t finish the sentence before Campbell is finishing it for him and putting the team in the set. Sometimes in practice they just look at each other and nod. Talking about a guy physically who is playing at a deficit. As Cronin said in the post-game interview, “You can’t get any more out of his body and his God-given things that he has that he can’t change. He totally maxes out.” Isn’t that what we’re all striving for, really? To do the most with what we’ve been given.

And then there’s Jaime Jaquez. The spirt animal. Everyone – every coach – should have one. He epitomizes the toughness, both physically and mentally, and the competitiveness of Cronin’s program. Again, the theme with these three guys is doing it all for the right reasons, and getting the most out of what they have. Jaquez is, really, a 6-6 power forward with old man, rec-center moves. And he’s one of the small handful of the best players in the country. If you’re talking about doing things for the right reasons – one of the reasons he came back to UCLA for his senior season was to be in school for one year with his kid sister, Gabriela.

And, as fans, it’s difficult for us to realize what these guys have given of themselves. They play themselves to exhaustion on a regular basis. Jaquez played 39 minutes against Gonzaga, while Singleton and Campbell put in a paltry 38. That’s like running a marathon while playing basketball. And they’ve done it through painful and debilitating injuries. Campbell started off his career with an ACL tear that took him a year to recover from. Singleton took six months to return from a foot injury, and then probably a year to get his body in optimum shape. Jaquez limped through the NCAA Tournament last season on two horribly bad ankles.

“Now the weight that you carry seems such a heavy load…

While you're face down in the moment waiting to let go…”

And there’s Mick Cronin. He wasn’t necessarily injured, but you have to know that he puts himself through self-torture every season. Sleep deprivation. Hyper-tension. Lately, he’s been trying to find some kind of zen, and you’ve noticed he’s more composed on the sideline. Heck, just not to be a better coach but to preserve his health. But it’s like holding back the tide. He is what he is – and that’s one of the most highly competitive human beings on the planet.

We’ve been blessed as UCLA fans to be able to root for this.

It definitely is a moment that we should cherish. Things don't always come together at any given moment and give you something to believe in. Face down in the moment.

Of course, there are some things we can always second guess. We wouldn’t be fans if we didn’t. Personnel usage. Should Cronin have put some pressure on the ball on Gonzaga’s last possession? How can this team go over 11 minutes and not make a basket? But, really, those are all things that we can nitpick, but UCLA basketball, we, of course, love you. We love the program, the coaching and these players.

If you’re going to get into the details of the game, though, there’s one over-arching motif to the movie here that you can’t forget. UCLA was without two big-impact starters. Keep that in the front of your mind. All the TV pundits, when talking about UCLA in this Tournament, should preface everything they say by stating it. It was without the Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year and perhaps the best defender in the nation, Jaylen Clark. And it was without the Pac-12 Freshman of the Year, and one of the biggest post presences in the nation, Adem Bona. The person that shall go unnamed had 36 points for Gonzaga, and you don’t think that Bona might have, at the very least, slowed that down a bit?

And if you want to talk about coaching, nitpick the details, there’s one mind-blowing takeaway from all of this. This UCLA team had a serious chance to win the national championship without two starters. That’s like saying a college football team was competitive for a national championshp while missing 8 impact starters. This, really, isn’t possible. How Cronin could make this team competitive without Clark and Bona, and even enable you to think it could win a national championship without them says it all right there about the coaching in the UCLA program.

Yes, it makes you wonder what-if. What if UCLA had Clark and Bona? Well, easily, now that we get the lay of the land in the NCAA Tournament and have been able to see the competition, UCLA very well might have been the favorite to win it all.

Really, what this is, what the UCLA program has given us, is hope. And hope is what is the most potentially heartbreaking. Back in the days when UCLA didn’t have a coach you believed in there wasn’t really hope, and without hope there’s no loss. The biggest fallout of disappointment from this game came after Amari Bailey actually hit that three-pointer with 12 seconds remaining. It provided hope. Then the hope was dashed. That’s the most painful – the hope. But what are we without it? Back in those former days without a program you could believe in you were a shell of a UCLA fan. Now, most of your fandom – almost every season ends - with disapointment. But heck, that’s what it is to be alive, right? It’s a long series of losses with a few wins sprinkled in here and there to keep you going. Well, actually, 31 wins this season, which does give you a lot to keep going. 

“You keep waiting on the night...
You keep waiting on your pain…
And every moment that you wait now is a moment slipped away.
I think you're gonna have to come out…
And face all the fear you can't explain..

All your life you've been face down…
Now it's time for you to see…

See it…”

But if we are talking about heartbreak, it is heartbreaking to realize we’ll never see these players take the court again in a UCLA uniform together. But they had to leave sometime, and they went out as the warriors we know them to be.

And we won’t remember this season as only another statistic of a team that went to the Sweet 16.

We’ll remember Jaquez, Campbell, Singleton – and Clark and Ken Nwuba. They’ll be the guys that over-achieved as they always have, and gave us hope that they could win a national championship playing without two starters. That's what the 2022-2023 season will always mean to me.

The only heartbreak is that this group was so deeply enjoyable to watch and root for – that this group gave us so much hope.

So, UCLA basketball, thank you. Even though it can be heartbreaking, it’s great to have hope again.