Louisville 76, Georgetown 58

If anybody still had any Hoya hope, this one should have taken care of it.

Just very simply never, ever in the game. Lousville rained threes from the start as if they were living in one of Larry Bird's best dreams, and there wasn't a thing the defense could do to slow them down or the offense could do to get back into the game.

Hoyas Prospectus is calling it Georgetown's worst game of the season, statistically, and given the work they do and what we saw with our own eyes there's no reason to doubt them.

This game was a comment on the sad state of this season. Go back a month and a half, and you'd have looked at this game as a good test, heading toward postseason. Louisville was hot, and at times this year has looked like a real Final Four contender. But you can size up their weaknesses (point guard play, drifting focus) and imagine how a good, disciplined, hard-nosed team might beat them -- especially at home.

But the Hoyas are no longer the kind of team that can imagine anything like that. Louisville is out of Georgetown's league, as is almost everybody else in the Big East.

The Hoyas are 14-12, 5-10 in the conference, looking at a near-certain loss at Villanova this weekend and then, hopefully a couple of wins against St. John's and DePaul to close out the regular season 7-11 and show up with a lousy seed in the conference tournament. They will rank as one of the year's most disappointing teams, nationally.

Just amazing.