Guard him. Guard HIM!

I gotta think I missed my chance.

I mean, what I do here is fun and all, and I've made what you might be able to call a living for the past 10 months watching sports and typing. There's no shame in that. And I won't say I missed my calling, because I don't think I have, even though there's still a chance that I could. But, at this point, I still have a pretty OK shot at having a future clackin' away on the keyboard and giggling. So, it's not a flash of regret that I'm having. It's more like an epiphany.

I may be cozy with who I am, but it's what I could have been that bugs me. Because I could have been the most feared being in collegiate athletics.

Huh? Me? Let's be kind and rewind for a sec. (It's a figure of speech, not an oversight to the extinction of VHS and the fact that no one born after 1997 will ever own a VCR. But I guess if you want to be pushy about it, we can say, 'Please use your DVD remote to skip back a few scenes.' Yeah, because that sounds great.)

Eh hem. Pretend its 1980 for a minute. Pac-Man was a video game, not a thug. The Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC) emerged as a pioneer in unwieldy acronyms. And people knew Patrick Duffy from Dallas, NOT Step By Step (... day by day).

As influential as 1980s pop culture may have been, however, 1980's biggest shockwave wasn't named Madonna, and it wasn't even when Mount St. Helen's erupted, though that was certainly a catastrophe worth noting. The change that will resonate for generations to come involved a strip of white paint laid tidily on the basketball courts of the NBA.

The history of the 3-point line actually reaches back further than T.J. Sorrentine's range (the parking lot!), but it didn't stick nationally until the NBA adopted the 3-pointer in the 1979-80 season. Sure, the ABA had it first in 1968, but the ABA was like Slamball for our parents -- awesome, great team names, not built to last.

But I'll say this much: the ABA got at least two things right. The first was the slam dunk. The second was the 3-pointer, which reopened basketball to the short, the medium-sized and the fundamentally inclined.

Therefore, any kid born after 1980 was given the option to shoot from a previously scoffed-at distance and actually get rewarded for it. Height or silky smooth moves were no longer necessary to excel in basketball, and perfecting a deadly-accurate 3-point shot then made the player with such skill a viable commodity, even a threat. As one high school coach once told me, "My plays work a lot better when the kid makes the 3 instead of misses it."

Fast-forward (or skip ahead a few scenes) to Sunday. Pitt's playing Xavier and Jordan Crawford is ripping my heart out. Yet, he's not the guy I'm keeping a weary eye on when Pitt needs a stop. The guy I don't want to even sniff the ball is not the one who dunked on LeBron James. It's Brad Redford, the 6-foot, 175-pound gunner from Frankenmuth.

It's not like I want Crawford to get the ball, either, and just score at will. But Jordan Crawford falls into the same category that LeBron James is in -- the unguardable. If a guy like that beats you, then, well, the best player won out. That's fine. You can live with that. But the one thing that socks you right in the gut is getting beat by a considerably less-talented player who can do one thing and one thing alone. That's bomb 3s, and he's been practicing since conception.

Think Syracuse fans don't still loathe Sorrentine? How about Ole' Miss fans and Bryce Drew? The single most feared and hated entity in collegiate athletics, if not all of sports, is the kid who can hit ridiculous, game-changing 3-pointers like they're layups on an 8-foot hoop. Even though he's not that good.

And you see it coming as soon as he checks in. I mean, which type of player on the court prompts you to hiss "Guard him. Guard HIM!" every time he skitters around the perimeter? Is it the DeJuan Blair type? Of course not. The Crawford type? Maybe, and he did hit a few really deep shots against Pitt, but Crawford is the player that can do anything well and doesn't have to rely on the 3. The player you fear is the player that doesn't think of passing or driving when he catches the ball. He's on the court to shoot shots that no one should ever make. And yet he does.

How? Practice. That's it. Tons and tons of practice. Does it take talent? A little. But Brad Redford didn't get a scholarship to Xavier because of his God-given ability alone. He played in the NCAA tournament because he's probably been putting up 500 shots a day since 8th grade. He mastered the 3-pointer and is reaping the rewards, just like hundreds of short, white guys have done and will continue to do.

Thing is, in the time it took me to write this, I probably could have launched 500 3s of my own down at the park. But it's too late for me now. Had I started young enough, I could have been a Redford, a Drew, a Sorrentine.

Now? Who knows ...

-- Step by Step got me thinking about Suzanne Somers. First, I wondered if her Thighmaster money has lasted this long, and I'm still not sure. Second, I remembered she hosted that show Candid Camera for a period of time alongside Peter Funt. Which also got me thinking ... If there were an NCAA tournament bracket for names that sound dirty but aren't, Funt would be at least a 2 seed.

-- A lot of people wondered why Buzz Aldrin would do Dancing With The Stars. Since Buzz and I are old friends, I dialed the operator on my rotary phone and asked for Buzz, so I could ask him why he did it. Know what he told me? "To finally make a name for myself," he said, forgetting that Neil Amstrong was a contestant on season one.