Excerpt from "To Hate Like This ..."

Editor's note: The following introduction is from March 2007. The subsequent entry is a passage from the book. "You must be so happy," the waitress at my local breakfast joint said to me a week or so ago. I could feel no joie de vivre rising off me. I looked like a man who'd been imprisoned in a bottle all winter. Coffee seemed like a logical place to start a life's worth of rehabilitation. "Why's that?" I asked. "Duke lost, you dummy," she said, as if she were telling me the punch-line to my own oft-told joke. Had I told her I hated Duke? Damn. When? (ESPN.com)