courtesy of Jack Alden

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"Kirk's ankle doesn't look the best in the world. They did x- ray it, nothin's broken, it's a severe sprain. Kirk has twisted his ankle, sprained his ankle, whatever you want to call it, several times during his career, and this is the first time I've ever seen him stay down. He's usually bounced back up. I even asked him, this appears to be a lot worse than anything you've ever done. He said yeah, the rest of the time he just rolled it. He gets up and limps around a little bit and continues to play. But this one was worse. We have no idea of his availability 48 hours from now, so it's just something that we'll have to wait and see. My guess is he'll get a heck of a lot of treatment in the next 48 hours. "To say that we feel very fortunate would be an understatement. We didn't play as well as we wanted to play. We got off to a decent start, then made a couple of defensive errors and they took the lead around the 11-, 12-, 13-point mark. At that point we weren't doing what we wanted defensively. We kept putting them on the free throw line and were not stopping dribble penetration. Didn't shoot the ball very well. And then the big thing in the game is we turned it over so many times. Yet I'm very proud of what we did. Nick has four fouls, Kirk's there on the bench with his ankle on the chair, everything looks bad, but the kids did not panic. I think last Sunday at some point we panicked against Oklahoma, but I didn't sense that at all today. The kids stayed with it. I thought Drew's interior passing to Wayne for a couple of dunks was extremely important. Boschee's three was extremely important. And Aaron's shot as the shot clock expired was important. I was glad to see he's no longer a freshman. He knew the shot clock was winding down and he put the ball in the basket. "You have to congratulate Holy Cross. I told Ralph it was no consolation, but I thought they outplayed us and definitely outcoached us, but we were fortunate. I'm awfully proud of our team, because there's just so many expectations, yet they dug a little deeper today down the stretch. And whether it's ugly or not, we're still playing and we feel very fortunate."

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