Let's podcast. No Joe Jillio today. It is a travel day for the Jillio family. They're coming back from the Final Four in Phoenix. I'm Joe Ovious inside Eifford Studios. Thanks to Empire Properties and thanks to Copiers Plus. Check them out online at Copiers.com. Get that print assessment, move your documents to the cloud. Save money. Find out how you can do it by going to Copiers.com. Without Jillio here, it's a bit of a Friends of the Podcast sort of day. West Durham, ESPN, ACC, ACC network will drop on by Mitch Northrum, who's been helping us talk about women's college hoops. He'll be on Luke DeCock of the News and Observer. Kate Rogerson of ABC 11. She did the double. Cleveland, Phoenix. How tired is she? We'll catch up with her in a little bit. I did want to start today's show, though, going back to Saturday and doing the after dark. And it's funny, I knew it was going to be a technological challenge. I was praying to the cell phone

tower gods. I needed that 5G to be hidden. It wasn't quite hidden. It's fine. We made it work.

I know some of you appreciate the DIY nature of this podcast. Salute to y all. But part of my

issue with Saturday was I think I was trying to do a little too much.

I wanted to take in what was going on on Hillsborough Street.

I wanted to take in what was going on in downtown Raleigh because you just haven't seen this with NC State.

In basketball, you just haven't seen it.

I mean, it's been 41 years.

So I wanted to see what it was like around town while everybody was getting ready to and then obviously watch the final four.

So I ended up at Mitch's.

They had closed off the block in front of Mitch's Tavern.

I know they had some technical difficulties to get things going to get the game on television.

But once things got going, everybody was having a

good time. I got there probably two hours before tip off as the crowd was gathering. It was a lot of fun.

But the problem was between kind of taking things in, taking pictures, doing some stuff for social

media, taking a lime scooter back to downtown Raleigh, watch the second half in the Raleigh times,

it was a little bit of a herky jerky watching experience for me, for NC State Purdue.

So I went and I watched the first half again.

And the reason why I went back and I watched is because the general sentiment for NC State was they missed a bunch of shots.

Yes, they did miss a bunch of shots.

But the thing that I immediately took away in the first half, and I know it's something that Jilio had tweeted out, but it was fairly obvious with the way that the game started was NC State had played a very specific way throughout this

entire run and they benefited by having everybody on the court. Even Mo Diara, who with Ramadan

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