Alex Rodriguez met with reporters prior to the Yankees' season-opening game. (AP)

NEW YORK – For his first public moment in a Yankees uniform since the playoff disaster, Alex Rodriguez was told to stand in a doorway on Monday morning. He stepped from the Yankees clubhouse less than 1½ hours before his team's first game and walked not toward the blue backdrop with the team logo attached to the wall for the purpose of impromptu news conferences, but instead to a spot pointed out to him near the clubhouse door.

Perhaps the Yankees were saving him the inglorious symbolism of being pressed against a wall as he was grilled about his bad hip, his disappearance over these past few months while recovering from surgery or why his name showed up on the records of a Miami lab in possible violation of baseball's rules on performance-enhancing drugs. Or maybe the Yankees wanted to keep him away from anything that identified him as a part of the team, aside from the cap he wore on his head.

And as A-Rod has been for much of his professional baseball life, he tried to

WASHINGTON – The tide is coming fast now – an orange sea rising, crashing, rolling, licking at your feet, flying at your head. You look up and see a forest of hands. You look down and see hands, too. And you wonder how this is possible. You ask how this is happening. And this is when they have you.

For much of these last three decades, the Syracuse Orange have played a single defense – they have played a 2-3 zone. There have been moments when Syracuse has deviated from this plan and its coach, Jim Boeheim, has been struck by a momentary need to have his players express some repressed animalistic virility and play a traditional man-to-man defense. Such moments have not worked well. Invariably "The Zone" returns.

But never in the years Syracuse has played its trademarked zone, dating back to a forward named John Wallace and a national championship game against Kentucky in 1996, has one of its teams played a zone so hard, so furious and so complete as this, the fourth of

WASHINGTON – One last time the Baron of the Big East stalked the Verizon Center hallways on the day before a big conference game. Strange, that of all the men who could be the face of the first basketball league made for television, it would be the one with the balding head, tiny glasses and upturned nose who became its visage.

Come Saturday afternoon, the dying conference will take its final, unexpected gasp on the floor of a league arena, no less, and Jim Boeheim will stand guard before one bench, just as he did in the Big East's first season back in 1979. Through all those years, John Thompson and Louie Carnesecca and Jim Calhoun then departed, Boeheim never left. Mainly because he had nowhere else to go.

In a transient world of college basketball where a coach's commitment to a school lasts until the private jet of another university's booster lands at the local airport, Boeheim never left the shores of Onondaga Lake. No place else ever seemed right. His people

WASHINGTON – They stumbled down the hallway of the Verizon Center late Thursday night as sentries in a war they could not win. Indiana players Cody Zeller, Christian Watford and Victor Oladipo stared surprised at the massive gantlet of cameras that lined the corridor. It was the look they wore for much of their Sweet 16 loss to Syracuse.

A look that said they never saw what was coming.

IU's Cody Zeller is trapped by Brandon Trich, left, and Rakeem Christmas. (AP)No. 1 in the NCAA tournament's East Region fell hard at the Verizon Center. It fell like no one could have imagined. And it fell to the oldest trick of the fourth-seeded Orange. In fact it fell to Syracuse's only trick, the one it has played for decades in the Big East and the one it will play in its ACC future. Who would have thought Indiana would collapse in the jaws of a simple zone defense.

"That's all we play, they shouldn't be surprised," Syracuse guard Brandon Triche said after his team's 61-50 victory over the Hoosiers.

But surprised or not, Indiana did not look ready for what

WASHINGTON – In a college basketball planet where loyalty goes as far as a ticket to the NBA draft, there is still a team like the Marquette Golden Eagles. There is still a team that turns every possession into a death battle with collapsing double-teams, arms upraised and even a firm shove when the officials aren't looking.

Jamil Wilson celebrates Marquette's win over Miami. (AP)And there is a team with a rumpled, bald-headed coach who screams and stomps a lot and goes by the none-too-flattering nickname of "Buzz."

On Thursday night, third-seeded Marquette swarmed the second-seeded Miami Hurricanes with a relentless defense in a 71-61 Sweet 16 victory in the East Region of the NCAA tournament. Really, Miami stood no chance. The team that had been so strong in the ACC looked lost against a team from its old conference. Again and again, Miami tried to pass down to its big men only to have that player surrounded by a forest of hands. Passing out did little good. Most of Miami's long shots or three-pointers were challenged, too.

BRADENTON, Fla. – The kid was a natural the junior college coach kept saying. But how many times had Florida State's offensive line coach Rick Trickett heard that line? Everybody, it seems, has a prodigy to push: a player ignored, forgotten or left behind. Four decades of a football life taught Trickett there usually was a good reason they had been overlooked.

Menelik Watson works out in preparation for the NFL draft. (IMG)Still the coach at Saddleback Community College was persistent and Trickett had flown all the way to Southern California to look at another player. Since he was already there…

You have to meet Menelik Watson, the junior college coach insisted.

Trickett shrugged. Then the door opened and in stepped a giant standing 6-foot-6 with hands like catchers' mitts and arms bursting thick from his sleeves. He must have weighed 300 pounds. He had a gold tooth and a smile that glowed. And when the man spoke, his words spilled out in a Mancurian ramble almost impossible to understand.

"I got excited when he walked

MOON, Pa. – This is what college basketball still can be in a world of one-and-dones and broken conferences and coaches draped in Armani. Yes, there can exist a steamy night in a tiny gym high on a hill by the Pittsburgh airport where the little guy stands strong, the giant topples and a swarm of students clad in red spill from wooden stands and dance on the remains of a national champion.

Never in an eternity could a school like Robert Morris get a team like Kentucky to come to its 3,000-seat Sewall Center, even if this is the hometown of Wildcats coach John Calipari. The dollars wouldn't allow it. And yet by the magic of a broken season, the NIT and the indignity of hated Louisville playing the NCAA tournament on the Wildcats' home court, there were Kentucky's players filing off the bus Tuesday evening, dripping of entitlement and stepping in the smallest locker room they will every see.

Then there they were, hours later, walking away losers in the first round of the NIT after

LOS ANGELES – This is the NFL's MVP seven years on and now he's standing in a plane crash. All around him rests a moonscape of broken seats, jagged metal and crushed houses. A suitcase rests beside his foot, a little girl's bicycle is tucked under the fuselage. Smoke surrounds him. And Shaun Alexander smiles.

Yes, it is going to be a good day.

He squints at the morning sun climbing over the mountain, clasps his hands, nods, raises his hand and …

Action!

Shaun Alexander talks with Candace Smith (R) and another actress involved in the project. (Y! Sports)In a world somewhere off the set of Universal Studios, free agency churned through its second day. Names flew from one roster to another. Cell phones chirped. Wide receiver Darrius Heyward-Bey – freed the afternoon before by the Oakland Raiders – kept taking calls. But inside the fake world of movies, time stood still. Only four seasons have passed since Alexander played his last NFL game. It is conceivable that had he not left the game at just 31, that might have been his name on the free agent ticker, too.