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AMES – There’s a type of optical illusion called an ‘ambiguous image.’ It’s when a single image can be interpreted differently depending on how you view it.
There are famous examples in art you’ve probably run across. Like a picture that looks like a duck if you peer at it one way, but a rabbit if you shift your focus. Or the one that appears to be a vase, but also two faces staring into each other if your focus shifts to the empty space around what you just thought was a vase a moment ago.
Essentially, it’s two equally real, distinct and separate images existing in a single image. What you see depends on what you focus upon.
Which brings me to the No. 10 Iowa State men’s basketball team and its 88-85 double-overtime loss to No. 22 BYU on Tuesday night.
Within that 50 minutes of basketball are two ways to view the game and the Cyclones.
The more optimistic perspective would be to see the grit, toughness and resiliency it took for the Cyclones to battle back from a 21-point second-half deficit to force the extra time, with the ball and the chance to win at the end of regulation and both overtimes.
That is no easy feat, and the Cyclones should absolutely be commended not for simply trying really hard and not giving up, but for channeling that into productive basketball that nearly, oh so very nearly, produced a victory.
The other perspective, though, would focus on the negative space of the day.
Which is to say a top-10 team, in one of college basketball’s most formidable buildings and on senior night has absolutely no business falling behind by 21 points in a game that is crucial for a myriad of reasons. And a game, by the way, they ultimately lost.
“We clawed all the way back,” Iowa State senior Curtis Jones said, “but it’s on us for getting down that much.”
So which is it? Happy to have found the fight to nearly salvage the evening or despair that it ever got to that point in the first place?
The problem, as I see it, is that it’s both.
This team is two…
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Author : The Des Moines Register
Publish date : 2025-03-05 12:08:00
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