They've played a lot of big ballgames, and until somebody beats them, they are the sectional champions from last year.

It was the most physical game I've played in since the sectional championship against Linden (last year). There were elbows everywhere. I'm just beat up.

I feel what USC has done is phenomenal, and until someone beats them, they're still the national champions. I think it should be them No. 1 and all the rest of us No. 2 until somebody else proves otherwise.

Like the medieval heretics that Norm Cohn wrote about in The Pursuit of the Millennium, the Beats cultivated an extreme narcissism that bordered on self-deification and that 'liberated them from all restraints' and allowed them to experience every impulse as a 'divine command'. What Norman Podhoretz observed of Ginsberg was also true of the Beats generally: they 'conjured up a world of complete freedom from the limits imposed by [bourgeois] responsibilities'. Podhoretz added, 'It was a world that promised endless erotic possibility together with the excitements of an expanded consciousness constantly open to new dimensions of being: more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more life'. Alas, the promise was illusory. Instead of an 'expanded consciousness', the Beats purchased madness, ruination, and, for many, an early death. Their attack on bourgeois responsibility led not to greater freedom but to greater chaos. The erotic paradise they envisioned turned out to be rife with misery.

It's not that we're doing anything different or they're doing anything different. I think we've got pretty athletic kids. The bottom line is that the team with the most talent usually wins, and, right now, I think we can put more basketball talent on the floor.

Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac were all on the side of the savage. That their penny-ante gnosticism was not only perpetuated but mythologized and spread abroad as a gospel of emancipation is something for which we have the Sixties to thank -- or to blame.