Sooners prevail, do not impress, on Arkansas' home court
Author’s Note: Good thing this game began at 7:30 rather than 8, because it took almost 2 1/2 hours to play and because this one was also to be sent to The Norman Transcript for its Sunday morning sports section, making the deadline 11 p.m. for a game that ended about 9:58. It’s been a long time since I did what I did with this one and that meant, beginning with about 8 minutes to play, during time outs, beginning to write two different columns: one for a loss and one for a win. So, as the buzzer sounded, I deleted the first 200 words of the “loss” column and picked up where I left off the first 200 words of the “win” column. Had the game gone overtime, The Transcript might have had to go without me. As it was, I finished the draft at 10:44 and the first edit/proof took 14 minutes, while the second and final edit/proof took only three. Not much of a performance by the Sooners, even in victory, but the excitement of being up against deadline, remains fun.
Defeat avoided.
Oklahoma made a winning play or two or three, all of them down the stretch, and it was just enough to clip Arkansas, a team that may be going nowhere in the SEC even faster than the Sooners, which is saying something.
Absolutely, that’s a not very charitable interpretation of what took place Saturday night inside Walton Arena, and still it seems much nearer any truth asserting the Sooners (15-4, 2-4 SEC) figured something out, something they can build upon, something they can take with them into their near-term conference schedule and expect to win any of their next five games.
Instead, OU’s 65-62 victory on the Razorbacks (12-8, 1-6) home court is a reprieve.
It’s a time-buyer that puts the Sooners in shape to somehow, someway, find something they’ve not yet found that leads to stealing a game or two among their next five.
Their next five?
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