Tucson Eight Straight, and the Fourth Rack Arrives
Cleveland State66
Arizona23
- Game
- 2037 Week 7
- Site
- Away
- Result
- Win
- Record
- 7-0
Vikings 66, Arizona 23, in Tucson. Seven and oh.
Forty-three points of daylight in the desert. Our eighth straight win over the Wildcats. In 2025, Arizona came to Cleveland and beat us by twenty-one, and Big Stan’s whole counter went silent, and I wrote a column I still can’t read. Twelve years later, we’ve won eight in a row. Time is a good coach, folks. So is Coach Dolan.
Sam delivered the fourth jersey rack on Saturday morning, before the game. Walnut, of course. He set it up in the spare room next to the other three and stood back, and then he did something. He took jersey thirty-one, my first one, from 2024, off the first rack, and moved it to the new fourth rack. Alone. At the very front.
I said, “Sam, why’d you move thirty-one?” He said, “Mickey, the fourth rack is for whatever comes next. It should start where you started.” Then he left. He always leaves right after he says something like that. It’s a carpenter thing. They measure twice and talk once.
So the fourth rack has one jersey on it. Thirty-one. Room for more. I don’t know how many. I know I’ll ask myself every year: one more?
Four pierogi. One on the plate.
A forty-three-point road win at Arizona. Seven and oh.
I saw the fourth rack on Sunday. Sam is a genius. I want that on the record in a newspaper. He’s built every important piece of furniture in this column: four chairs (two plain oak, the T and the R), a rocking chair for two, a record cabinet for Teresa and me, a walnut box for a nail, a ramp for an old beagle, a marker for the same beagle, a shelf for the chairs, and now four jersey racks. He’s never once explained what any of it means. He doesn’t have to. Everybody who’s sat in one of his chairs knows.
At trivia this week, The Nurses’ Station beat Regression to the Mean again. Teresa’s team has now won eleven straight weeks. Nadia gave them a plaque: “MOST CONSISTENT TEAM.” It hangs next to our old one, the one we won for finishing last eleven straight weeks in 2025. Same words. Opposite meanings. Nadia says that’s “the whole bar in two plaques.”
My father, Sunday: asleep. My mother said he’d been asking about “the box with the nail.” I’d told him about it in the spring. He remembered. She said, “He wanted to know if Mickey still has it.” I said yes. She said, “He said, ‘Good. Keep the empty ones. They’re for later.’”
Back and forth
Thirty-one at the front of the fourth rack.
Where you started. Sam measures twice and talks once.
Your dad said keep the empty ones.
“They’re for later.” I don’t know what he meant. I think he meant everything.
Eight straight over the Wildcats, a fourth walnut rack starting with jersey thirty-one, two trivia plaques with the same words and opposite meanings, and a father who said keep the empty ones, they’re for later.
Split Decision is fiction. Mickey Bridges, Ken Hogmanes and The Lakefront Ledger are invented; the games and scores are not.