College basketball’s most concerning headline this week is far deeper than the one-and-done conversation that typically is generated when the NCAA’s best players spend a little more than one semester as a full-fledged student-athlete. That topic has already been debated ad nauseam, so I won’t address the elephant in that room. Instead, my concern is with the piano in the corner of the room. We all have either owned or seen that piano—it still haunts some of us. The piano that is now out-of-tune and collecting dust because the visions of playing Beethoven on a grand stage met the reality of only being able to play “Chopsticks” in front of grinning grandparents. It became furniture-by-default once the lesson plans intensified, the material became more challenging, and the instant gratification of applause became more and more fleeting.
