I ended up awake until 6 a.m. Central Time watching what was at times a thrilling men’s final at the Australian Open, and somewhat to my surprise, it ended better than I could have hoped, with a four-set victory for Safin. None of Hewitt’s conduct in this morning’s match endeared him to me any further; the number of beautiful shots he made couldn’t cancel out his cheering his opponent’s mistakes or jabbing a finger toward the linesman who had (accurately) called a foot-fault on him. What a graceless human being Hewitt is. And they showed repeated shots of an Australian TV star who was identified as his girlfriend, which reminded me that I had read about he and Clijsters breaking off their engagement a while back, so now I have no reason to believe he has any redeeming features. (Besides, I think Safin wins in the gorgeous girlfriend department; speaking strictly as a heterosexual female, I can only say, “Yowza!”)

So even if my very favorite players didn’t win, it turned out to be a reasonably gratifying Aussie Open. More successful than this weekend’s basketball results, in which the Gophers got (predictably, but by a bigger margin than expected) clobbered by the Illini and the Wolves, playing at home, failed to defeat a severely depleted Kings team despite a typically superb performance from KG. Sometimes I think that now that it’s been nearly seven years since I left Minneapolis, I need to quit rooting for their teams…but it’s not really something I can control, unfortunately.