John Blanchette

A thousand of anything implies routine and the 1,000th of Courtney Vandersloot’s passes to have assisted a basket at Gonzaga University mirrored that, lobbed an arm’s length over the baseline into the hands of Kayla Standish for a layup. Hold the mustard.

Gonzaga senior Courtney Vandersloot took the suspense out early in her march to 1,000 career assists but the Bulldogs had a much tougher time with Pepperdine Saturday afternoon.

Matt Bouldin took in the Gonzaga- Memphis game from a courtside seat at the Spokane Arena – or pretty much the last place he expected to be the first Saturday in February. His calendar instead showed a game 10 time zones away in Athens – his club team of Iraklis of Thessaloniki playing at Ilisiakos, with maybe a chance to move up in the standings of Greece’s A1 league, given that both of them are deadlocked at the bottom.

In a Gonzaga basketball season that has left the Zags constituency in various states of stupor, grief, incomprehension, grousing, worry, relief, humility and flummery – among the wild spikes of hope and despair – there have been two specific bafflements: • The standings. Fourth place? In the West Coast Conference? Really? We are talking about Gonzaga, right?

PULLMAN – Go ahead, storm the court. Everyone else has. Video games don’t deal in as much carnage as what occurred in college basketball’s Top 25 over the weekend. Before sundown Sunday, a dozen teams in the Associated Press poll lost in the previous 30 hours, 10 of them to unranked opponents or a team below them on the list.

So if a bleacherful of students in purple T-shirts yells, “We’ve got spirit, how about you?” and nobody answers, is it still a spirit game? You bet your chicken. Or your shoes. Whatever.

Sitting atop Willy, a buckskin paint, on the sidelines at a Boise State football game, Leon Rice could imagine only two things going wrong. First vision: He would end up like the silver-helmeted ROTC commandant in “Animal House,” foot caught in a stirrup, dragged up and down the field by the spooked horse.

The definition of an unqualified hockey success? When you run out of cannonballs for goal celebrations – and beer. As long as you can radio for backup beer, of course.

SEATTLE – Never before has a shovelful of dirt fit a man better than tailored Armani. We keep trying to bury Matt Hasselbeck, but he will not go quietly, like the Python character on the oxcart of dead bodies protesting, “I feel fine.” His contract is up, his callow relief was poised and conservative last week and he’s been a mess for a month or more. He keeps getting fluid drained from his hip. On Saturday, the defending Super Bowl champs and the Sports Illustrated Athlete of the Year were imported to nudge him over the lip of the grave.