Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio) is frantic. She’s weaving her way through crowds of Congressional pages, men in suits, security officers on radios. She only has a few minutes left.

“Don’t forget where you came from” is the refrain that slinks around just about every college campus as graduation nears.

Yesterday morning, in White-Gravenor: “Tyler, can you do a little better than [win] at the end of the game? You’re killing your professor here. You guys gotta build up a lead and sit on it!”

January 25, 2006, in the Car Barn: “Mr. Wallace, boy, if you had missed those free throws [against Duke], I might have killed you.”

Just over two years ago, I wrote a column about the importance of perspective when it comes to making executive decisions about the hirings and firings of a sports team (Yanks, Sox Not Lucky in Fall Classic, THE HOYA, Oct. 28, 2005, A10).. A couple of big-market clubs had just been bounced from the MLB playoffs, and the Northeast radio stations were abuzz with speculation on what

The French take their gastronomy and their football (better known to Americans as food and soccer) very seriously. But they also seem to take great pride in their well-maintained cemeteries, which makes for a brand of sightseeing not always common in the United States.

Pere Lachaise, the most famous graveyard of the bunch, was built under Napoleon in 1804, and is home to more than 300,000 restful residents spread over a vast, hilly expanse of opulent tombs and, in a few cases, outright monuments. Pere Lachaise and its renowned counterpart, the Cimitiere Montparnasse, have long been coveted resting places for the rich and famous, and they house a number of famous figures, from rock stars like Jim Morrison to classical composers like Camille Saint-Saens.

Of course, that never happened. Even though many considered the radio tower to be an eyesore, its curved, stretched-toward-the-sky design grew on the French populace. After it was used for communication in World War I, it became symbolic of the Allied victory. And so it remained, even as French writer Guy de Maupassant dryly claimed to dine often at the tower only because it was the single place where it could not be seen.

On this day 100 years ago, about nine blocks away from its current Verizon Center home, the Georgetown men’s basketball program started off with a bang. A 22-11 drubbing at the Washington Light Infantry Armory turned out to be the start of a legendary college club — and a story whose highs and lows rival those of the classic epics.

1907-1916

Any survey of the history of Georgetown basketball’s 100 years is bound to focus on 27 of them. The John Thompson Jr. era, punctuated by 14 consecutive NCAA appearances between 1979 and 1992, constituted one of the most successful quarter-centuries any basketball program has ever seen, not to mention the last time the Hoyas were a serious threat to win a national title.

It would be an overstatement to say that the Georgetown women’s basketball team did the impossible in 1993. But for the Hoyas, the 1992-93 season was particularly special because it was the final reward after years of falling short, years of questioning whether the team would ever make it to the NCAA tournament, let alone to the Sweet 16.

For the Hoyas, it was nothing less than ultimate poetic justice.

“We deserve the game,†then-Head Coach Pat Knapp said to The Hoya after a late-season win over Connecticut, and no one on the Georgetown campus would have disagreed.