On the drive down to Bloomington on Friday evening, Jayna Bardahl and I were talking about how empty and sad the Breslin Center seems this season when we go to cover a game.
I said to her, “The team probably doesn’t even know we are there,” and we shared a laugh.
With Michigan’s strict COVID-19 protocols as cases continued to rise in the state, fans – regardless if they're an athlete's family, a friend, or a Spartan student – haven’t been allowed to attend games for the most part.
The walk to section 135 at Breslin Center is always a silent and cold one, where we might pass the team's communications coordinators or some sort of arena crew.
We get to our tables, we sit 6-feet apart, we don’t converse with anybody unless over Zoom and we leave.
That’s why, when I was walking into the courtside stands where they had seated the media 10 minutes before the game was scheduled to start in Indiana on Saturday, I was shocked to see Hoosiers bearing their red and white pride entering through the large front doors.
There weren't many, of course, but there were more than the Spartans are used too and that played a role in the afternoon’s victory, I think.
The last time that the Spartans were guested by appearances from their families was over MSU’s winter break before Gov. Gretchen Whitmer enlisted enhanced social distancing. Head coach Tom Izzo said post-game that he hopes soon that those in power will become more lenient over these last two weeks as the Spartan dawgs come to a close on their regular season.
“These kids deserve to have their parents at their games, I don’t see any problem with it,” Izzo said, claiming that they did their two weeks already.
Aaron Henry said his father James was in the stands today, that he and his mother, Nicola, had made the drive down from Indianapolis to watch him play.
“I haven’t won in Indiana before in college, it’ll be a nice win for me to think about in the future,” Henry said. “I try to approach every game the same. Everybody’s just fed up, I guess...fed up with just losing, fed up with just being short and not being prepared coming into games. We started out that way today and I didn’t want it to be like that, especially in front of my parents.”
Henry said that he hasn’t seen his dad in a while and that alone was enough to motivationally boost him into victory. He went on to tie his career-high of 27 points this afternoon.
“That meant the world to him,” Izzo said.
The smile on Henry's face post-game proved that. Silence is heavy and deafening. Crowds, as we saw at times last year, are the key to an MSU victory.
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