Your Milwaukee Panthers have gotten busy winning basketball games.
It is now 5 wins in a row with today's uneven but welcomed victory over IU Indy at the high school gym known as the Klotsche Center that we call our home court for 2-3 games each season (and recently, the playoff games as well, for noise level reasons- more on that disappointing trend in a future post).
IU Indy (5-10, 1-3) is a better team than their record indicates, but they should not have put the scare into this Milwaukee team like they did this afternoon. All's well that ends well and Jamichael Stillwell (10pts, 13reb)- racked up his 5th consecutive double-double- setting a new program record.
We competed very evenly with IU Indy and didn't much press our rebounding abilities (36-26). We also didn't make a ton of mistakes (FT and 3pt shooting were good, turnovers were low). Kentrell Pullian (20pts, 3ast, 4reb) and Themus Fulks (26pts, 5ast, 5reb) provided just enough offensive support to get the Panthers to win #10 today.
The Panthers are rolling as well as anyone could hope for at this point in the season. With Horizon League play exclusively from here on out and 17 league games remaining, the shape of this season is still very much in the team's control. We could tack on another 15 wins or we could peter out with less than 20 overall victories by the start of the HLT.
.jpg)
But if we want the casual Milwaukee area fan, the freshman casual basketball fan or first year Panther grad student to take Milwaukee Panthers Basketball seriously? We have to grab hold of and harness this momentum all the way to March. All gas, no brakes through the Horizon League Tournament tape and beyond it.
Far too often in recent years (Lundy has provided some of the only hope outside the mirage hope of a PBJ-led, Top 25 Panther team) this program has set up expectations, only to fail spectacularly in meeting those expectations and building on positive momentum. Usually the higher the expectation, the bigger the letdown and the more deafening the resulting silence.
Outside of reaching the Big Dance again, none of these expectations have been particularly lofty. They are expects of momentum-sustaining home wins, of a marquee non-con victory, of punching a Dance ticket, of making "Milwaukee Panthers" a known and sought-after commodity in the Milwaukee and Wisconsin basketball hoops communities.
But they remain elusive and it is a shame because you need to learn to walk (4,000 fans) before you run (7,000 fans) and we are still crawling as a fan base. We are still crawling out from the hollowed-out and silent stretch of futility and darkness that was Panther Basketball from 2016-2022.
Now we, for the first time since beating Wisconsin and Minnesota on the road in 2015, have a big chance to right the ship of this flagship program (the Milwaukee AD top-to-bottom should know full well that this is the flagship marketing and sports arm of the university though I am not convinced they all do). In light of NIL and Transferpalooza and the changing nature of college basketball, we stand at a crossroads.
Do we resign ourselves to always being slightly above a DIII program, wallowing in a crumbling conference, retreating to our on-campus gym as an excuse for our abysmal school spirit, never scheduling difficult non-con opponents and never dreaming to be seen as anything more than a Cinderella story from the early part of the 21st century?
Or do we recapture that youthful optimism and that "joie de vivre" that surrounded the program for nearly a decade; when anything seemed possible and ideas, hopes and aspirations for the future state of the Milwaukee Panthers flowed like a swift and buoyant stream of intelligent, Black and Gold-tinted collective consciousness?
It's hard work to build new things. But with all the work the coaches and the team and the assistants have put in to get this Panther team to a 10-4 (3-0) record with sights set on a ticket to the Big Dance, we have to start somewhere. It gets easier to dream with every win.
Never let the pessimists win. Our boundaries as a program (, and as a university,) are largely self-imposed.
go panthers.
tilt the floor. 🏆🏀
Comments