Funny, because Sippin on Purple is celebrating it's first ever week as one of the internet's top 25 Northwestern sports blogs. 

• So, I'm not allowed to write about basketball on here, but after a 40 year bowl drought, well, I feel like it's okay to at least chronicle some of what's going down in the NU internets. LTP has something,NUsports.com has something, SBNation has something (although, yo, way to link to the article Loretta wrote that didn't really have anything to do with the ranking as if it was written after the fact, SBnation editor guy), Spread Far the Fame has something, Fire Bill Carmody has something (and is presumably contemplating changing a blog name to "iwouldhavesupportedfiringbillcarmodyawhileagobutnowamfullybehindhim.blogspot.com"), Welsh-Ryan Ramblings put up a brief something, and as noted, the AP wrote something. 
• I don't have a twitter, but if I did I'd probably be starting to get pissed off with all the "Northwestsern is in the top 25! Variation on a joke about this being the apocalypse!" tweets that were funny the first time but not funny the 403rd. 
• NU fans, thank these people. Especially Dave Jones and Bob Sutton. Those dudes are troopers. 
• Normally my home page is set to my gmail account, but that's taking a one-week hiatus. I decided I need to see this every time I open my browser.
  
• However, if you must check a college basketball scoreboard, don't use ESPN's. Something that's frustrated me while trying to check out Northwestern's chances of being in the rankings the next week night after night is that ESPN's scoreboards and bottom line use the ESPN/USA Today rankings, made by a panel of one coach from the majority of DI conferences. NU is #30 in these rankings, and it made it really difficult to track the wins and losses of the #19-25 schools in the AP (not to mention the teams between #26 and #30, which were just as pivotal to NU's ranking), because the AP and ESPN polls generally differ a decent amount towards the bottom. So, if you're looking to see a college basketball scoreboard where Northwestern is featured with a nice little superscript ²⁵ next to it, go to the Yahoo or CBS Sports scoreboards, which feature the AP rankings. 
• Of course, whenever Northwestern does something good and potentially has an opportunity to be newsworthy, you can count on the Chicago sports world managing to find a way to ignore it anyway. Tomorrow's sports pages will certainly be filled with Vinny Del Negro's imminent firing and whatever horrific thing happens to the Chicago Bears on Monday Night Football, and if the Wildcats win on Wednesday or the football team wins in the Outback Bowl, I predict something else crazy happens, like Notre Dame pulling a reverse Urban Meyer by firing Brian Kelly days after hiring him, or Lou Piniella hockeyfighting Ozzie Guillen at center ice in the during the second intermission of a Blackhawks game, ensuring Northwestern's hypothetical top 25 teams receive nothing more than a 250-word brief on page B13. 
• As for me, at first, I was a little bit disappointed to see this now: I have a lot of football related posts planned for this week, and my gut reaction was like, "man, can't this wait a few days until the bowl is over and there's nothing left to post on my site?" Then I remembered all those times I'd reloaded a college basketball scoreboard checking results of the 17th-35th ranked teams in the nation, thinking it would somehow effect NU's as-of-then nonexistent ranking, watching a Memphis-Umass game last week because Memphis was hypothetically 28th ranked or something, and realized, well, Northwestern is here, and I remembered why I named my site "Sippin' on Purple" (besides the part about it being a Gucci Mane lyric). 
• I realize now that the timing is, if anything, serendipitous: With us in a bowl and ranked in basketball, potentially ranked in both with an win in the Outback, you can expect the "hey, both teams are successful" angle to be featured in any NU games/highlights of those games on Sportscenter in this next week. And at this point in Northwestern sports history, all we can ask is that people take a look at our athletics programs and realize that the training wheels are off.