Over the weekend, Kentucky dispatched a feisty, rugged Cincinnati team, with relative comfort. I would argue that there was little doubt in the outcome of the game after the under-12:00 media timeout of the second half. And if you’ve really been paying attention to Kentucky, there was little doubt in the outcome of the game from the moment Willie Cauley-Stein splashed back down to Earth following his latest poster dunk near the end of the first half.

But that was not the story coming out of Saturday from a lot of outlets and television experts. To a large cross-section of the March-only media, Cincinnati had reinvented the wheel. The Bearcats had solved the Calipari Conundrum and Kentucky is in trouble moving forward.

Yeah, not so much.

Cincinnati did manage to ugly-up the game and play physical defense, but this is about as revolutionary in March 2015 as the shot clock, which is to say, not at all. This has been the book on talented Kentucky teams for years. Louisville employs this strategy on an annual basis to nominal success (1-7). Of course, since most of these people writing this expert analysis have not actually watched those games, it’s new to them. Don’t spoil it for them. Because they’re going to spend the entire week getting their hopes up for West Virginia on Thursday.

You see, West Virginia they’ll say, is a deeper, more talented version of Cincinnati. Why, their coach even used to be the coach at Cincinnati. To support their argument, they will cite the 2010 East Region Final in which an entirely different West Virginia team employing a completely different style of play upset an entirely different Kentucky team who also employed a completely different style of play. That game and its result will have about as much bearing on Thursday’s game as the particular color underwear you and I are wearing on Thursday.

By tip-off on Thursday you may even be wondering why the Cats are even going to bother showing up. Pay no attention to the fact that they were not seriously challenged last weekend. The standard to which this UK team is held has reached a ridiculous level and despite what pundits will proclaim to whoever will give them air time or column space to proclaim it, the ridiculous expectations are not from the crazy, overzealous Big Blue Nation. No. It is actually the media themselves who have created this impossible expectation for Kentucky to live up to.

Don’t believe me? Just watch, read and listen. In Nashville, the ESPN crew lost their minds because Kentucky had to call a timeout in the midst of a blowout to inbound the ball. A team manages to string together a six-point run, and the tone of the broadcast is noticeably different. “Get the President on the phone!” “Scramble Kenny the Jet!” “Kentucky’s lead has been cut from 17 to 13 before the under-12 timeout of the second half!” And it’s just Kentucky that gets this treatment.

Duke played an offensively challenged San Diego State on Sunday and at one point midway through the second half, the Aztecs managed to trim the Duke lead to seven. No one so much as raised an eyebrow, because they knew it was inevitable that Duke would remember it is Duke and run off 8-10 points in short succession. And that’s exactly what happened.

But Duke is not the story this year. Duke is not undefeated. Kentucky is the story. Kentucky is undefeated. There’s a different standard. An impossible standard. It’s a compliment to the stature of this program in 2015. It is also monumentally frustrating. I think someone at some point said something about the theft of joy. Probably relevant to this.

If Kentucky dispatches with West Virginia on Thursday night because it does not feed the West Virginia offense with turnovers and it makes most of the many free throws it will surely take (West Virginia leads the nation in fouls committed) there will be a new narrative. A new challenger. Maybe Notre Dame. Maybe Wichita State. It won’t matter. At all. Well, if it’s Notre Dame, it may matter to the extent that someone will likely pull Digger Phelps from the mothballs so he can gloat about his meaningless regular season win over UCLA forty years ago, but other than that it won’t matter.

If it’s Wichita State, it will be revenge. It will be the great rematch. The role reversal. It will make for the kind of storyline that typically leads to a WrestleMania Main Event this time of year. If it’s Notre Dame, the Digger/UCLA angle will come to the forefront. The Notre Dame run in the ACC Tournament will be proof that the Irish are up to the challenge.

The point is these pieces will continue until either the Cats win it all or they are upset by one team or another. And, oh, if it’s the latter, the ‘gotcha’ pieces and ‘I told ya so’s’ will be as plentiful as the pollen in the spring time in Kentucky. That will be a glorious day. So many people who were so wrong, so often, can finally claim that one of the dozen teams or strategies “they” predicted were ultimately the Cats’ undoing.

There’s a good chance that day never comes and Kentucky completes this historic run. Then everyone can go back to writing about or yelling on Hot Take Show X about how Calipari and Kentucky are ruining college basketball all the while conveniently ignoring the fact that UK’s run has brought record ratings and attention back to a sport badly in need of a boost.

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