Notre Dame Basketball will not make the NCAA Tournament.

In the words of the late Kurt Vonnegut:  So it goes.

Tonight's 77-60 loss at home at the hands of Scottie Reynolds, Dante Cunningham and Shane Clark (Shane Clark?) drove the final nail into the coffin built with a seven-game losing streak and lined with losses to Ohio State and St. John's.  Perhaps the saddest part of the defeat was how unsurprising it was.

Kurt knew.

The guard play was anemic: Jackson, Peoples and McAlarney went a combined 4-of-22 from the floor and 1-of-11 from three-point range with nine turnovers to eleven assists.  Free throw shooting was a pathetic 10-of-20 (Someone get Ty Nash with a shooting coach five months ago).  Harangody, Ayers and Nash did what they were supposed to do, but the rest, especially the last ten minutes of the second half, was a disaster.

The Irish made exactly zero field goals in a seven-minute stretch from approximately eleven to four minutes left in the game and, frankly, looked lost on offense.  Yet, nothing looked out of the ordinary.

The sad truth of this season was that this Irish team was exactly what they were and, save the Louisville and Providence wins, nothing more.  An undersized but spectacular force down low (Gody) surrounded by one great shooter (Kmac), one solid set shooter (Ayers), one increasingly erratic point guard (Tory) and one of four bit players (Zeller, Nash, Peoples and Hillesland) NONE of whom play defense, is not enough to get by with on the hardest schedules in the toughest conference.

For many Irish faithful who remember the 2005-2006 Season of Infinite Sorrow, this season, tonight's game, are all too familiar sights.  Maybe it's the coach, maybe we over-achieved the last two season, maybe Rob Kurz is the greatest basketball player of all time and world's great mistake is not recognizing it - at the end of the day, and with one more home game left, there is nothing to say but, "So it goes."