March 22, 2001. A day that will live in infamy.

On this date I wrote a column that ran in The State News’ NCAA Final Four special section and the Arizona Wildcat, the University of Arizona’s student newspaper.

In the column, I trashed the entire Arizona basketball team and program while fully displaying my Spartan pride, which single-handedly angered the entire Arizona campus - in fact, before tipoff I received roughly 165 hate e-mails from Arizona basketball fans from across the country.

Those fans called me things like a white, pasty Midwesterner, Mr. Fatfield and even names that are far too inappropriate to be published in a newspaper. I laughed at every one.

So here I am in my apartment, which is packed full of half-drunk people anticipating the greatest whooping college basketball has ever seen.

Then it happened. Everyone in my apartment became silent when they heard the final buzzer.

’Zona 80, MSU 61. ’Zona wins.

The entire campus and area surrounding it went silent.

I couldn’t believe it. I felt so low. I wanted to crawl inside my shoe and never come back.

The next few silent moments in my apartment and the Cedar Village areas were creepy, to say the least.

But the silence broke in my apartment when one of my friends yelled: “Hey Fatfield, go check your e-mail!”

It’s as if every Arizona fan in the nation were sitting at their computer just waiting to hit the send button and tell me what they thought of my bold prediction.

With more than 200 new messages in my Pilot account all with crafty titles like “Hey %!@$#” or “Mr. *@!%$,” I laughed again.

I thought about replying to every single e-mail and defending our poor, or lack of, performance in that game.

But then I thought about it for a few minutes.

We’ve had some of the most amazing champions to ever grace the college sports world in this semester alone.

A Spartan named Ryan Miller broke a 70-year-old record, a women’s basketball team kept fighting for wins only to keep coming up two points short, a men’s gymnastics team knew its program would be canceled at the end of the season but never backed down. And perhaps the biggest champion of all, McNamara, a wrestler who fought with tears in his eyes and demonstrated the passion to win like every Spartan, athlete or not, should display.

These student-athletes epitomized what it means to be a Spartan.

So I looked back at my computer in my apartment and wrote a simple reply to the 400-plus hate e-mails that kept flooding my pilot account that read: GO GREEN! GO WHITE!