ESPN.com - NCW - The season that was supposed to be

Then I grew up to enter the world of sports writing, where the unofficial motto is: "It doesn't matter who wins or loses ... as long as you don't have to cover the losers."

Obviously, athletes can be quite different depending on the outcome of their games. And, just as obviously, you find out more what they're really like as people by seeing them after losses.

There is the thought that we writers really don't know anything about anything. Least of all, the personal character of those we write about.

Depending on the sport, that's sometimes true.

With women's basketball, though, it is easier to get closer for many reasons -- including that there just isn't the volume of media covering it as there is some other sports, so it's not as difficult to form connections.

But the kids also make it easier -- just by being themselves. I don't think they know this.

Never have figured out what they really think of us, the inquisitors. But I doubt they realize how we appreciate it when they come in after a game with those giant sacks of ice on whatever body part is aching the most, with the cold that won't go away and the four-page paper due tomorrow -- and then say something funny.

Anyway, everyone's going through their senior days now. The Class of 2001, which we all knew was special when it came in four years ago, is preparing for the finals acts. Parents come, flowers are handed out, the kids say, "I wasn't going to cry unless she did, and then she started, and then we all started ..."

It has been a difficult year for this class. Two of its marquee members, Tennessee's Tamika Catchings and Connecticut's Svetlana Abrosimova, had their final year cut short by injuries.

It has also been a triumphant year for this class. Notre Dame's Ruth Riley has put together all those pieces that everyone could see were there. Southwest Missouri State's Jackie Stiles -- the embodiment of why people love basketball -- is closing in on the NCAA scoring record.

The conference tournaments and the NCAA Tournament loom, and seniors will get their last chance on stage just as they do every year. Except ...

It won't turn out right for everybody. It never does. But for some seniors, it will turn out so far from what they thought was right, they have to readjust their whole way of thinking about the season.

It so happens that's the case for the seniors I know best.

Because of proximity, Kansas is the team I've seen the most for the last five seasons. The previous four, the Jayhawks have been successful. They've finished in the top four of the Big 12, they've gone to the NCAA Tournament. There's always been intrigue in February and a trip to plan in March.

After they lost leading scorers Lynn Pride and Suzi Raymant from last season, there were questions about how they'd make up for the points, how long it would take to adjust.

But there wasn't the thought that things would pretty much collapse, that they'd be near the bottom of the Big 12. That they'd show flashes of playing extremely well, yet never really catch a spark. That's what happened, though. The Jayhawks are 10-16 heading into their final regular-season game (at Texas A&M on Wednesday), and for the first time in 10 years won't make the NCAA field -- unless they somehow win four games in a row and take the Big 12 tournament title.

Not too likely for a team that hasn't been able to win back-to-back games for almost three months and is just 4-11 in conference play.

This is how it has gone this season for Kansas: No good feelings have lasted long. The Jayhawks knocked off the team this particular group of players considers their archrival, then-No. 6 Iowa State, last Saturday. Elation. Four days later, they lost for the fifth time in a row to Nebraska, another team going nowhere this year. Frustration.

It hasn't been much fun to watch Kansas this season. It has been a little like seeing a movie that had some interesting characters and the potential of a decent plot -- yet the execution failed and the dialogue fell flat and it just couldn't be salvaged.

But it has been even less fun to play for Kansas this year. The kids have to go through it every day. They really fought it at first, certain they could right the ship.


	Senior Brooke Reves averages 13.6 points and 7.1 rebounds for Kansas.

Then there was the gradual realization that maybe they couldn't.

Followed by the acceptance that the clock wasn't going to start turning backward. This was it. They were going to keep busting their tails, but they weren't going to be able to stop losing games.

For the seniors, of course, this was the most difficult. And watching them, you see something much bigger than just a basketball season gone awry. You see people poised on the brink of adulthood, facing the fact that life sometimes just doesn't go the way you want it to.

Their stories aren't unique, just symbolic. Perhaps in them, you'll recognize kids you know.

Kansas point guard Jennifer Jackson is a thin, red-haired rascal who has this wicked grin and is as tough as any football player who ever walked around like a god in her hometown of Tuscaloosa, Ala.

She was a shooting guard in high school, but KU needed her at point, so that's what she's played. If KU had asked her to take Allen Fieldhouse apart brick-by-brick and reassemble it on the other side of campus, she'd have done that, too -- while maintaining her 4.0 GPA.

Jackson was cautious around us Yankees at first, and she still can be, sometimes. But she has been able to stop herself from saying "Yes, sir," and "Yes, ma'am" to us now every time we ask a question.

She makes us laugh more than anybody, with her Southern witticisms and wry sense of humor.

She once said of her baseball passes to fellow senior and fleet-footed Brooke Reves, "I just aim for the band (at the end of the court) and throw it as hard as I can. I know Brooke will always get up there and catch it. ... She can catch anything. Sometimes she catches it before I throw it."

Jackson's as smart as any kid I've ever covered, but she knows, like other smart folks from the South, that the drawl can make people underestimate you, stereotype you. She has fun with this.

She says she wants to be a lawyer, and she'll be terrific at that. I'm sure she'll fight as hard for clients as she has for KU. She severely injured her ankle before her sophomore year, and it has slowed her down and caused her pain ever since. Not that she would admit this.

She was forced to miss two games last season after having another surgery on the ankle. The first game she was gone, KU lost at Creighton. Home in Tuscaloosa, where she had the operation, Jackson saw the score across the TV sports ticker and threw her shoe across the room.

Other than those two, she has been there every game for KU. No matter what has happened, the only person I've ever heard her rip is herself.

"I looked like a third-grader out there," she said after one multi-turnover game.

The South and its customs are a big part of her life, and so on a serious note one day I asked her once about the prejudices that linger. Here was a white girl from Alabama who came to Kansas to play for a black coach.

She thought about the question, because Jackson doesn't just talk off the top of her head. She knew the complexities of this issue, but it was also obvious that it was somewhat difficult to answer for one reason: the fact that Marian Washington and the former KU assistant coach who first recruited her, Tim Eatman, were black was something than never really entered Jackson's mind.

Still, she's not naive. She is well-versed in the history of the South, including the most grim, shameful parts. She knows the caricature of Southerners.

"Any time I can be somebody who dispels the myth that all Southern people are like that, I'm happy to do that," she said.

Jaclyn Johnson, another KU senior, is from Burbank, Calif. For whatever reason, she never seemed to have trouble adjusting to KU or the Midwest or anything else.

Johnson has played some amazing games in her time at KU, maybe none more so than against Vandy's 6-foot-6 Chantelle Anderson in the NCAA Tournament last season. At 6-1, Johnson didn't shut down Anderson -- that's virtually impossible. But she simply wouldn't quit trying, regardless of the height mismatch. The game went into double overtime and Johnson was battling Anderson to the end.

Kansas State coach Deb Patterson once said of Johnson, "I'm not sure she gets the credit she's due sometimes, because you just take it for granted. But she can be just relentless. She just doesn't stop."

While Jackson is a historical buff to the point of being able to recall details of games she might have played in elementary school, Johnson has been very clear with us reporters that she did not dwell on the past.

"I don't know you guys ask me about last year," she'd say, laughing. "I don't remember what happened yesterday."

Johnson has been the most verbal about KU's poor season. She has called out her teammates and herself several times. Not only does she not pull punches, she sends them in flurries.

Some of the things she has said have sounded overly harsh. But some have been so dead-on honest, you have to respect them. After KU lost at Colorado in January, she said, "We keep talking about turning things around, but let's face it: We don't have it this year."

Nikki White, a 6-4 post player from Memphis who showed great promise her freshman season, is one of those players who make you wonder what might have been. Her knee has been in bad shape since junior high, and finally she had an experimental type of surgery done to try to regenerate the cartilage. She sat out what would have been her sophomore season, and then hobbled through the last two.

She has a year of eligibility left -- but her knee doesn't have anything left. Four years of pain are enough. She won't go through another.

Yet she's the player who always makes everybody on the team laugh. And she has a faith that has made whatever has happened to her not so much of a disappointment.

For Reves, though, there's really not been much of a safety net this season. Nobody has taken it harder, nobody has blamed herself more, nobody has gone out every game more determined to try to make up for it all.

Reves missed the 1998 NCAA Sweet 16 season the other three participated in. She had to sit out that year after transferring from Wichita State. Her first game with the Jayhawks was on national TV in the 1998-99 season opener against North Carolina.

There weren't many public expectations for Reves. We'd all seen her identical twin, Amanda, who was the star of KU's volleyball team, so we figured it was genetically impossible for Brooke to not have at least some athletic ability. The coaches had mentioned she was a good hustle player, had worked very hard in practice during the season she sat out. But we really didn't know that she was any good.

So when she came into the game and was battling like crazy, showing the kind of heart that you can instantly recognize as beyond the normal, I looked at the guy next to me -- another reporter from Kansas -- and said, "Jeez, what is this? Why didn't they tell us?"

Well, the coaches didn't quite realize what they had, either. First, they had her walk on. Then they gave her a scholarship, but told her she had to prove herself to keep it. They told her she couldn't have her favorite jersey number, 5, until she'd earned it over a season. So she took 14 (add the digits together and you get 5 -- pretty clever) and went to work earning the real thing. She has more than done that, scoring more than 1,000 points in her three seasons at KU.

That day against the Heels, she took an elbow that split open her forehead. She went to the sidelines, got a butterfly bandage put on and then came back in the game.

KU lost, but it was obvious the Jayhawks had found something in Reves.

She had to get eight stitches after the game, and when she came to be interviewed, she looked out of sorts. I'd never talked to her before and figured it might not go all that well; she was obviously mad about losing and probably had a hell of a headache.

In the three years since, I've talked to her dozens of times and learned things about her. That she went to high school in Denver, but lived many places -- including England and Mexico -- growing up, which made her very open to different customs and people. That she has an endless reservoir of kindness inside, despite what might initially appear to be a tough outer shell. That she is the first to recognize effort in her opponents, and always compliments them for it. That she would rather take 80 stitches than feel as if she'd ever let down anyone.

But I had an idea even that first afternoon she'd be one of those players you wouldn't forget. It wasn't what she said, really. It was the feeling that she never wants a game to end, that she loves to play so much.

This season has been a nightmare for her. She could quit caring; they all could. They haven't.

"I'm just trying," Reves said recently, "to finish as strong as I can."

Maybe the seniors you know best will go to the NCAA Tournament. Maybe they'll win the national championship.

Or maybe they'll sit in their rooms in March while other people are still playing and wonder what they'll do next with their lives.

The seniors I know best? This year has been hard for them, but they're going to be OK.

Mechelle Voepel of the Kansas City Star is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. She can be reached via e-mail at mvoepel@kcstar.com.

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