Illinois Fighting Illini Basketball: Hello darkness, my old friend…

College basketball is one of the most enjoyable sports to watch, even if the quality of play isn’t always up to par. It has been some time since the Illinois Fighting Illini have been enjoyable to watch, but there are possibly dark days ahead.

For the Illinois Fighting Illini, losing a brutally hard-fought game at home by one stinks. It stinks even more when you were down 20 and had to play out of your mind to get back into the game. That kind of effort going for not is just a major bummer. But honestly, none of that even crossed my mind when the buzzer went off Tuesday night against Michigan State.

I think this is the first time ever as a fan I didn’t care if my team won or lost such a meaningful game. Could not have cared less.

Now let me be perfectly clear, as of this writing, we haven’t heard what exactly happened to Ayo Dosunmu’s knee and while I’m not going to assume it was a blown ACL, but it looked bad. Pretty much everyone in Illini Nation could agree on that. To be quite honest, I had bad Derrick Rose flashbacks and felt like I was reliving a nightmare:

Dosunmu’s injury could be surprisingly minor and he could be back on the court in two or three weeks. That would be a sizable victory all things considered. Of course, it could be catastrophic. Historically, Illinois has never had a ton of luck or good fortune as an athletic program. So this would be just another notch in that belt.

It’s difficult to put into words how much Ayo has meant to this program, but I’ll try my best.

Beyond what he’s done as an electric playmaker, leader, and especially a cold-blooded closer, the Chicago native was one of the first recruits that I can recall taking on the task to make this program his own. He wanted and embraced the challenge of turning what was a wildly dark time for what was once a storied program into a Big Ten heavyweight. Instead of joining the ranks of a college blue-blood, he gave Illinois hope that one day, they would be able to corral the bigger high school recruits in Chicago without fear of the Dukes and the Kentuckys crowbarring them away.

Most four and five-star recruits would do nothing but chuckle and sneeze at offers from Champaign because they had no interest in investing year(s) of their life trying to win a conference championship or develop there. Not with a program that was clearly going nowhere.

Brad Underwood scored the lottery ticket that he so desperately needed going into his second year as the head coach; he had no idea what he really had in Dosunmu.

That’s why this sucks. The sight of his left leg folding underneath him as he slipped with seconds left still makes me sick. You knew at that moment with a full head of steam that he was going to get a decent shot off. There was so much room for him to operate because one of Cassius Winston’s shoes came off on the previous possession. Even if he missed, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. It would’ve been a tough loss to swallow but they could at least recover and prepare for the next one.

This wasn’t supposed to be a chapter in the legacy of our beloved Ayo. He was supposed to leave Champaign as a pioneer, paving the way for the new-look program to be annual Big Ten contenders and March Madness attendees.

It’s not crazy to think that one of Illinois’ biggest 2020 recruits in Morgan Park’s Adam Miller could re-open his recruitment should Dosunmnu return for his Junior year. Should Ayo miss the rest of the season, he might stay at school for another year instead of jumping for the NBA in what is a weak draft. It’s a safer play, but it would have a real ripple effect. Miller would have presumably slotted into the starting guard role when Ayo presumably declared for the NBA draft. Now, that’s far from a certainty.

So this is the kind of injury that has a major widespread impact far down the road.

We should have been watching him ball out in what was probably going to be his final year. Instead, his entire world may have just flipped upside down. Maybe it’s not as bad as it looked, but his injury just made the journey to the Big Dance a whole lot harder. The seeding committee could possibly consider everything that the team accomplished prior to the Ayo injury, but it’s more likely everything after February 11th will carry a lot more weight if he’s out indefinitely.

I trust Underwood to rally the troops as this is the kind of thing that can galvanize a locker room. They’ll need maybe three or four wins to secure their spot in the tourney, but it will take a Herculean team effort to get to the finish line. All hands on deck for this job, with our without Dosunmu.

In the remaining seven games they play, five of them are categorized as Quad 1 opponents. Not great, especially with three of those five games are on the road.

For now, all we can do as spectators is hope and pray Ayo’s knee is still intact. Perhaps I jumped the gun to write this eulogy for his season and, possibly, the team’s season. But all we can do is wait and hope that maybe, just maybe, this is not yet another stroke of bad fortune, but merely a minor setback.