You Can’t Always Get What You Want
Remembering this Final Four Team
It was REO Speedwagon two weeks ago. Tom Petty last week. Today, it’s the Rolling Stones.
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is a song about the gap between desire and necessity. The message is that life won't hand you everything you chase after, but that what you actually need has a way of showing up if you stay open to it. There's a stoic, almost spiritual acceptance woven through the track.
Last Saturday night at Lucas Oil Stadium, Illinois lost to UConn in the Final Four, 71-62. The Illini shot 6-for-26 from three. They shot 6-for-11 at the rim, and that number feels generous because it doesn’t account for the shots that grazed every part of the iron and still didn’t fall. Andrej Stojakovic had a putback that rolled around the entire rim and hung on the back of it for what felt like five seconds before spinning out. Two possessions later, Solo Ball’s three-pointer bounced off the rim three times and rattled in.
That’s the kind of night it was.
I’ve been writing about this team for weeks now. I wrote about rolling with the changes when they were tearing through the bracket. I wrote about the waiting when the Final Four was only a few hours away. Today, it's looking back with a wistful smile.
It was awe-inspiring to see the streets of Indianapolis covered in Illini colors both Friday and Saturday. It was overwhelming inside the stadium, with more than half of the 72,000 fans clad in orange and blue.
I was lucky enough to be in Lucas Oil Stadium on Saturday and watch a team I love play one of the worst offensive games I’ve seen them play all year, on the biggest stage they’ve been on in two decades. And I don’t want to write about it, but I’m going to, because I want to get it all out.
And I want to remember.
The country’s most efficient offense scored 62 points on 1.02 points per possession. That’s the second-worst mark of the season. The worst? Their loss to UConn back in November. Dan Hurley has Illinois’ number. He just does.
It was such a good game, even though the shots weren’t falling. The defense was good enough to win. They held UConn to 35.5% shooting. They outrebounded them 44-37. They forced two scoring droughts longer than five minutes each. During the second one, Illinois went on a 10-0 run and cut a 14-point lead to four. With 1:38 left, Keaton Wagler hit a driving layup to make it 63-59.
It was right there.
Then Silas Demary Jr. ripped away an offensive rebound and Braylon Mullins hit a three that broke every Illini heart in the building. And there were a lot of Illini hearts inside that building.
There’s little doubt this was a national championship caliber team that didn’t have a very good day. Sometimes that’s the way the ball bounces.
They didn’t get blown out. They kept fighting.
I know what it’s like to cheer for a team you love come up short. I watched the cheating North Carolina Tar Heels take down the last Illinois team to reach the Final Four. This one is different. The 2005 team was the best in the country all year, and everyone now knows that the North Carolina squad didn’t even have eligible players in the starting rotation. This team lost to a program that’s won two titles in the last three years and knows exactly how to win in April. UConn didn’t steal anything. They earned it, and Illinois couldn’t make a shot.
So what do we do with all of it?
We remember. Wagler’s 46-point game at Mackey Arena. Stojakovic’s two-way destruction of Texas Tech. Tomislav Ivisic smashing the guitar trophy in Nashville. Zvonimir Ivisic’s poster dunk against VCU that made his brother’s face go full cartoon. David Mirkovic being David Mirkovic with his cowboy hat and his upcoming dangerous summer. Out-Houstoning Houston in Houston. Cutting the nets in the Elite Eight for the first time in 21 years.
The future is bright. Mirkovic should be back. Stojakovic could be a top-15 player in the country. Tomislav Ivisic played his best basketball in March and has more to give. Ty Rodgers is returning. Jake Davis is likely coming back. And there’s a recruiting class coming in with Quentin Coleman, Lucas Morillo, Ethan Brown, and Landon Davis that could give this program another run. Wagler is almost certainly gone to the NBA (He wouldn’t dare come back, would he?). The cupboard isn’t bare. It’s loaded.
The portal opened this week. Underwood and his staff know how to build a roster. They proved it this year. There’s no probation coming. No coaching scandal on the horizon. Just a program that made its third modern-era Final Four and has the infrastructure to get back. Soon.
Next season, a new banner goes up, and All-American Keaton Wagler’s jersey will sit in the rafters, too. These guys will come back for the anniversaries. They’re Illini legends now, no matter how Saturday turned out.
You can’t always get what you want. But sometimes what you get is a team that made you feel more than you expected to feel, a season that reminded you why you care about this stuff in the first place, and a future that looks like it might actually deliver on the promise.
Mick was right about the second part, too. You get what you need.
Be seeing you.
Easter Greetings from the Commander-in-Chief
On Easter Sunday morning, the President of the United States posted an expletive-filled threat to Iran on Truth Social. He promised to destroy their power plants and bridges. He ended the post with “Praise be to Allah.”
On Monday, he doubled down at a press conference, saying the entire country could be taken out in one night. When a reporter asked if targeting civilian infrastructure would be a war crime, Trump said the real war crime was allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
I don’t have anything clever to say about this.
A president openly threatened to destroy a civilization on the holiest day of the Christian calendar, and roughly half the country shrugged.
The View from Artemis
NASA’s Artemis II crew flew around the Moon this week and the photos are already some of the most extraordinary space images I’ve ever seen. The crew captured a shot of the Moon fully eclipsing the Sun from the far side, and it’s the kind of photo that makes you stop scrolling and just stare.
We waited 54 years to send humans back to the Moon and they’re sending back pictures that justify every second of it.
The AI Writing Witch Hunt
Joan Westenberg wrote a piece this week about the growing culture of accusing writers of using AI, and it landed with me. The short version: a debut novelist named Mia Ballard had her career destroyed after Reddit and YouTube decided her book was AI-generated. Her publisher pulled it. Her name was ruined. She says she didn’t use AI. Maybe she’s telling the truth, maybe she’s not.
Westenberg’s point is that nobody actually knows, and the tools people use to make these accusations are garbage. OpenAI shut down its own detection tool because it was worse than a coin flip. Stanford researchers found detectors disproportionately flag non-native English speakers and neurodivergent writers. The whole thing feels like a moral panic dressed up as quality control.
Mediocre writing is not proof of a machine. I think about this more than I’d like.
Remarkably Bright Creatures Trailer
I listened to the audiobook of Shelby Van Pelt’s novel earlier this year on my wife’s recommendation. She’d been telling me about it for a few weeks. I wasn’t sure a book narrated by a giant Pacific octopus sounded like anything I’d be interested in, but after hearing a snippet and diving in, I was totally wrong. It’s a story about grief, a mystery, and a quiet argument that paying attention to people is the best thing you can do for them.
The full trailer dropped this week, with Sally Field as Tova, the widow who works night shifts cleaning a small-town aquarium. Alfred Molina voices Marcellus, the octopus, and that casting alone tells you the filmmakers understood the book. Marcellus is the most perceptive character in the story. You need a voice that carries warmth and weight at the same time, and Molina has that. Lewis Pullman plays Cameron, the drifting young guy who shows up looking for family.
I’m looking forward to watching it on May 8.
