My younger son is really sharp. Sometimes I’ll get on him about doing something and he’ll say “I’m just trying to be like you, Dad.” He knows that with his wit, he can disarm me quickly. I’m a little afraid that when I inevitably ask him at some point this week why he hasn’t cleaned up his LEGOs, he’s going to say it.
“I’m from Baltimore, that’s why.”
I write a column like this every now and then. I should probably ask PressBox to retroactively go back and find them and create a series. The theme is of course, “This is why we watch sports.”
It was a tumultuous week for Maryland basketball. There are questions about Kevin Willard’s future, although it seems more likely he’s not going anywhere. There are questions about who the athletic director will be. There are questions about how much money the school can and should allocate to basketball and where the emphasis should be in a potential power struggle with the football program.
The Terps didn’t play particularly well for long stretches against Colorado State. There is room to question Willard’s decision to not give his last foul on their final defensive possession, when Jalen Lake made what could have been a game-winning 3-pointer.
And not any of that matters today. Not even a little bit.
You go through an immense amount of heartbreak as a sports fan. As a Maryland basketball fan, you’ve suffered through an unfathomable four buzzer-beating losses since the calendar flipped to 2025. Local sports fans couldn’t help but reflect on the additional heartbreak of the Mark Andrews drop that ended the Ravens’ season in that same timeframe.
But it’s the heartbreak that makes these moments all the sweeter. That’s why we know it’s more meaningful to be an ardent regional sports fan than to be a front-running bandwagon-rider. Watching the team you root for win an NCAA Tournament game on a buzzer-beater would always be sweet, but the heartbreak you’ve felt makes it mean so much more.
Derik Queen’s season was already exceptional. Now it is eternal.
These are the types of things you never forget. According to Sports Reference, Queen’s game-winner was just the 19th in NCAA Tournament history to come at the absolute buzzer that provided an ultimate result (In other words, the team that hit the winner was trailing and therefore would have lost had the shot been missed.) Nineteen! These are names you know and shots you remember like Tate George and Jordan Poole and Bryce Drew and Drew Nicholas and some guy who played for Michigan State in 2010.
In 15 years, you’ll be talking with your friends (unless our entire lives are lived on VR simulators by that point and you know what, maybe!) about your favorite NCAA Tournament moments. You’ll bring up Queen’s shot and you’ll remember where you were and who you were watching the game with.
And one of you will say, “And what was it that he said after he made it?”
And you’ll struggle with the wording in your mind. You’ll say, “Was it, ‘I knew I could make it because I grew up in Baltimore?'” Another friend will overconfidently say, “No, it was, ‘That’s what we do in Baltimore.'” But without question, you or another one of your buddies will remember, verbatim, “I’m from Baltimore, that’s why.”
As improbable and as tremendous as Queen’s game-winner was, that quote might somehow have been better. It speaks to so much of our shared experience. Queen said he had the confidence that he could hit the shot because he grew up with a chip on his shoulder that comes from a city oft-overlooked and underappreciated. And while Queen has dealt with far fewer doubters in recent years, that feeling never goes away. We all understand it. That quote was felt by Maryland fans, but it transcended basketball and even sport. All of us from this place can understand it.
It should be eternal. There are already T-shirts. The city itself should work to adopt it as some sort of slogan for marketing efforts. I’m not kidding. You could pay billions of dollars to consulting firms and not produce something like this. Plus it comes from shared joy. It is genuine. It is real.
I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen against Florida Thursday night. The Gators might be the best team in the country. But thanks to Derik Queen’s shot, the Terps will have a fighting chance.
All of the other issues are still there and will be dealt with. But for now, it’s OK to just feel joy. Such feelings of unbridled joy are fleeting for sports fans.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Maryland Athletics