As you are no doubt aware, unless you have recently emerged from a coma, the UCONN men's basketball team beat Duke in their quarterfinal game on an intercontinental ballistic buzzer beater following a miraculous steal, giving UCONN a one point victory after they had trailed the entire game. So okay, it's a win, and UCONN gets to go on to the semifinal and maybe win the whole enchilada while the Duke players are crying themselves to sleep.
But does either team deserve their fate? The shot could as easily have rimmed out, the stolen pass could have been two inches higher, with one less missed free throw it wouldn't even have mattered. What people seldom realize that the same principle is true for historical events of vastly greater import than a basketball game. We are built to look for patterns and meaning and causes everywhere, but sometimes stupid shit just happens. For example, if the very aptly named Anthony Wiener hadn't texted a 15 year old girl, Ronald Dump never would have become president. Now watch out -- that doesn't mean that was the single cause! It wouldn't have mattered if the corporate media hadn't been bizarrely obsessed with Hillary Clinton's information security practices, or if not for the unreality show The Apprentice, or a million other contingencies that had to happen for the Wiener dick pic to matter.
For want of a nail, a shoe was lost . . .
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