FULL CIRCLE

If you’ve been wondering whether the BCs have been away, the answer is “yes!” Since we last posted, we’ve crossed the Atlantic Ocean by ship, driven around the rim of a dormant volcano in the Azores, visited one of the oldest cathedrals in Spain (Santiago de Compostela), stood on the hallowed ground of one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War (Omaha Beach in Normandy), and walked around the prehistoric stone circle of Stonehenge – among other things.

That’s why we missed blogging about the Terps’ Annual Banquet and the Rebounders’ Mini-Golf Fundraiser. We were traveling.

But if you’re wondering whether that’s why we haven’t blogged about the Mystics this pre-season, no, it’s not about travel . . . it’s about choice.

Friday marked the sixth anniversary of the DCBasketCases blog. In those six years, we’ve written hundreds of posts, provided well over a thousand links, and shared numerous photos as well as anything else we thought our readers – primarily Mystics and Terps fans -- might enjoy. Those six years of blogging have been a lot (a lot!) of work. But mostly, our blogging’s been a labor of love. And that’s what made it worth doing.

We still feel that way about the Terps. Love the team. Love the program. Love blogging about them. But we no longer feel that way about the Mystics.

That franchise stopped being fun for us in October 2010. (No need to revisit that time. You know.) After that, our feelings about the Mystics franchise changed. We tried blogging about the team last summer. Readers undoubtedly could sense that we weren’t writing about the team with the same excitement, enthusiasm or humor that we had before. Frankly, it was all labor, no love.

No more. This season we won’t be Mystics bloggers. We now think of ourselves as fan-bloggers of the Terps and of women’s basketball. But the Mystics are no longer part of our blogger identity.

Sixteen summers after the WNBA was launched, we feel like we’ve come full circle. In 1997, there was no Washington Mystics, just a new professional basketball league for women. There was no blogging back then. But we followed the league, pulled for our favorite players, and simply loved that the WNBA had arrived, providing an opportunity for its talented athletes to perform in the USA in front of fans like us.

We still feel that way. We want the WNBA to survive and thrive. We look forward to seeing Crystal Langhorne have another All-Star season. We’re happy that Alana Beard will finally be playing ball again. We’re thrilled that Kristi and Marissa will again be wearing the same uniform, albeit the yellow and purple of the Sparks, not Maryland red. There’s a lot that should be fun or interesting (or fun and interesting) about this WNBA season. And we’re excited; just not about the Mystics.

So we may decide to blog about one of those fun or interesting things from time to time . . . and, of course, we’ll try to keep our readers up to date about any Terps news. But we won’t be blogging regularly about the Mystics. That’s a thing of the past.

We doubt that many of our readers will be surprised by our decision. You probably saw it coming. But we do appreciate that some readers may be disappointed that ours will no longer be a Mystics-specific blog. However, the blogosphere is big, wide, open to all . . . and free! So, if you care enough, there’s plenty of opportunity for you to blog about the Mystics. The BCs would be happy to pass the torch.

To those who now will no longer be regular visitors to the BasketCases blog, thanks for reading us. And, don’t forget, you’re always welcome to drop in at any time.

Photo Credit: DC BasketCases