Ah, Thomas and Mack Stadium, celebrated home of the 1990 spanking brigade and, I'm sorry to say, shelter to my reluctant soul only once in all my years as a student at UNLV, when I bought tickets to, and viewed, and enjoyed, Disney's Toy Story 2: On Ice. Still, eighteen years ago, when Jerry Tarkanian scared the bejeezus out of his players, motivating them to beat Duke 103-73 and set a still unbroken record for all-time blowouts in NCAA finals history, he stirred up a masterpiece. Tonight I rewatched the game, and it is just as epic and what-the-hell-is-happening? special that I wish I could toss away the last two decades, return to a Las Vegas where Steve Wynn owns half the state government and not all of it, and just kick back, enjoy the hideous, barren environs and pretend that something auspicious has just happened, that with this win, maybe, just maybe our creepy desert college will grow into something more than a scholarly spittoon where all the barely literate high schools in Nevada deposit their masticated pubescence. 
UNLV, though parochial and unthumbed like a fisted monkey, offers two blissful truths the transcendent power of which more accredited universities will never know:1. Back in 2000, the board of trustees (or whoever) voted to spend something like two-thirds its annual budget to build a marvelous new library, which is, everyone agrees, marvelous and stunning and absolutely worth the expense, but it hasn't ever voted to stock the library with books or academic journals or anything. The library even has this Robocop-looking automated retrieval service straight out of Back to the Future 2, but it can't actually retrieve anything for you, because there aren't any books or journals. This is Las Vegas logic at its most inspiring. Spend every penny--go into debt even, it doesn't matter--to construct the most elaborate and advanced research structure on the planet, and then forget to put anything inside it.
What makes Las Vegas sublime and persuasive is also what makes it totally empty and impossible to sustain. And when UNLV beat Duke in 1990--when a bunch of dusty dogs declawed the prissy, smartypants kittens from back east--it proved something weird and immutable about this country: we love dirtiness, even when the dirt mocks and discredits us. UNLV winning anything, even a dustbowl campaign against the Guthries and their loose chickens, let alone a basketball game against a genteel titan like Duke, so proud of its brainy prowess and bookish black athletes, brings the universe one thread closer to its inevitable unravelling.
2. When I took my astronomy lab as a very embarrassed senior, the class convened on top of the Bigelow physics building on the north side of campus. We were expected to locate double star systems and, like, predict the position of certain stars at certain times; but here's the humor, and why I will to my dying day remain fiercely loyal to this idiot college and its corporate nightmare of a city: you can't see any stars at night in Las Vegas, especially from the top of the Bigelow building, which is approximately four blocks southeast of the Strip. For those of you who have never been to Las Vegas, imagine giant shooting clouds of white phosphorous that cover the earth in every direction for fifty square miles: that is Las Vegas Blvd. From the top of the Bigelow building, especially at night, all you can see is the gaudy and clownish but nonetheless beautiful marquee for, what else, Circus fucking Circus. If you look above, you can barely make it out. But I promise you, at night, on that cold building in December, waiting for Aldebaran to rise so that I could calculate where it would be in three hours (how useless is that skill?), thinking about buying pot from my lab partner and wondering why the UNLV student body decreed we erect an enormous upside-down flashlight outside the Fine Arts building (it really is there), that towering pink clown's epileptic lollipop loomed over our lab reports like the very star of Bethlehem. On those nights, half illuminated by the glow of the casinos and half obscured by our own urbanly innocence, we felt like very stupid Magi bearing starmaps to the Baby Jesus, who, for sure, awaited our incorrect predictions poolside at The Mirage.
Bless you, Tark the Shark, for reminding me why I remember these things, and why I love that profane, peculiar city.
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