The mid-November start to the NCAA basketball season tends to get lost in the universe of sports coverage. This is probably due to the staggered opening nights around the country, but can also be attributed to competition with other sports -- college football entering its stretch run, the NFL in midseason, even the NBA's opening weeks garner more attention than college hoops. We're not about to let this exciting time slip through the cracks. With......

A day after Washington’s loss to…yes—hated rivals, the Dallas Cowboys, I find myself indulging in that oft-snarked out tendency of Redskins fans: the telling of sweet little lies. At least we didn’t get run out of the stadium, as we did against the Patriots. At least we didn’t collapse stupidly, like we did against the Eagles. At least the team we struggled with was a quality team (insofar as anything the NFC produces this year......

Ryan Adams is famously: prolific, eccentric, smart, currently-sober, a very hip New Yorker, unpredictable and a little nuts. That said, nobody knows what they're going to get when attending a Ryan Adams concert. Last night at DAR Constitution Hall, the alt-country musician gave the audience musical perfection and a heaping helping of tension. Ryan Adams and his band, The Cardinals, unassumingly took the stage to a half-empty room about an hour after the show......

At first, it looked like a laugher in progress. It ended as a nailbiter. In a slogging game punctuated by missteps and flukes, the Washington Redskins escaped with a win at home against the Arizona Cardinals. How'd Washington pull out the win? On balance, they just reaped slightly larger benefits from the errors, but credit some missed kicks and the strangest two-point conversion call I've ever seen for the victory. By and large, scoring opportunities......

The Wizards and Capitals are on summer vacation. The only Redskins news prominently features Ron Mexico and is not related to sports at all (well, human sports anyway). Despite these non-developments, this weekend has some intriguing aspects regarding actual Washington sports. >> Boxing comes to the District as the brothers Peterson square off in co-featured bouts at the D.C. Armory. Lamont and Anthony Peterson are a combined 42-0 with 25 knockouts between them. Anthony will......

One of the things we love about the NFL is how consistently entertaining the games can be while at the same time not making a whole lot of sense. After fifteen weeks, here's the stuff that seems understandable: San Diego and Baltimore are probably the two best teams in the league, Houston really should have drafted either Vince Young or Reggie Bush, the Cardinals should really think about ending their 25-year experiment of not having......

Shortly after Pope Benedict XVI was elected by the College of Cardinals, the Archbishop of Washington, Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, sent his letter of retirement to the Vatican. This is something that bishops are required to do when they turn 75, and the Pope accepted the resignation and soon nominated a successor. The Bishop of Pittsburgh, Donald W. Wuerl, was appointed to be the new leader of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Washington last month. Yesterday,......

The following is the first in a two part point/counterpart series by DCist Sports regarding Alfsonso Soriano and his future with the Washington Nationals. Today Matthew Bourque argues for trading him. Jeff Beam will provide the case for keeping Soriano tomorrow. When Albert Pujols of the St. Louis Cardinals landed on the 15-day disabled list with a strained oblique muscle, baseball lost its most prolific hitter. On Monday, an inconclusive MRI had experts believing that......

With a disastrous April in the books, is the honeymoon over for the Nationals and their fans? Over the weekend, the Nats dropped two out of three to Albert Pujols and the red-hot St. Louis Cardinals. The team has now lost seven out of its last eight, the lone victory coming Friday. For Nats fan who could actually watch the games on TV, the biggest story was Albert Pujols' 14th home run of the month.......

The Nationals enter the weekend needing reverse some serious negative momentum. Thursday night’s 6-2 loss to the Cardinals in St. Louis made for five straight. The Nats haven’t led in a game since late Sunday, a streak now at 38 innings—during which they’ve been outscored 23-10. They now trail the Mets by 7.5 games in the NL East. Last night, recent call-up Michael O’Conner made an emergency start as John Patterson nurses his sore......

Yesterday, it finally came to a head. The issue everyone kept putting on the backburner finally rushed to the forefront of the Washington Nationals' spring training season. Alfonso Soriano, the highest paid player of the club, refused to take the field in his assigned role of left fielder against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Space Coast Stadium in Viera, Fla. Brandon Watson eventually took the field in Soriano's place, playing centerfield while moving Ryan Church......

After the Washington Redskins and the Arizona Cardinals slogged their way through a first half that made an outright joke of the notion of professional athletics, Washington got even and then got over by a 17-13 score in a game that kept their razor thin playoff hopes alive. The first half was largely given over to a surreal orgy of turnovers, mutually engaged in by both squads. Mark Brunell offered up a trio of......

After a promising start to the weekend (a 4-1 win on Friday night), the Nationals dropped back-to-back games to the Cardinals in all too familiar fashion: Back-to-back 6-0 losses to the best team in baseball, and consecutive no-shows by the Nats' bats. Saturday, the Nats had no answer for the previously struggling Jason Marquis, managing just two hits. Yesterday they collected just four hits and two walks. It all adds up to another series' loss......

The summer of 2005 will go down in history as the summer D.C. became a baseball town, again. But it’s important to remember that, even without a long-standing hometown team, the District has always been home to baseball’s most important fans: the justices of the Supreme Court. No matter the batting order, the nine Justices of the Court have consistenttly ruled in favor of professional baseball, as a business, often at the expense of......

Thanks to another win last night, the Washington Nationals improved their first-place lead over the Braves and Mets by a full game. Not only that, but they extended their win streak to 5 games -- that's the record. Of course the Nats are ranked third overall in the NL behind the Padres and the smokin' St. Louis Cardinals, but when you see them ranked in order, the Nats look all the more impressive: Philadelphia......

After being swept by the woeful Reds (21-31) last Thursday, the Nats' prospects against the non-woeful Cardinals (33-18) looked pretty bleak. Friday's inevitable loss brought the team to .500, a low since late April, when the team record was just 11-11. Then Saturday's "L" put them under the halfway mark for the first time since the Nats' seventh game of the season, where they fell to division rival Atlanta. But then something happened: the Nats......

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. It's been a tough week for the Nationals, traveling to Cincinnati to face general manager Jim Bowden's former team. On Monday they lost by a not-deplorable score of 5-3. A day later, they improved substantially, taking the Reds to 14 innings before letting that one slip away 4-3. But if yesterday seemed destined to be the Nats' 23-inning 3-2 squeaker victory, well, it wasn't so. Cincinnati swept the series with a persuasive......

Washington Archbishop Theodore Cardinal McCarrick has cancelled his upcoming trip to Rome. The trip was unrelated to the Pope's health. Instead, the Post reports that Cardinal McCarrick will officiate a special noon mass today for the ailing Pontiff at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in the District. In the event of the Pope's death, all Cardinals under the age of 80 will gather in Rome for a Conclave, a closely guarded gathering in......