WNBA Finals. Surprise!!!

Wow. Now that one took me by surprise. No, not so much that the Minnesota Lynx are clobbering the Atlanta Dream in the best of 5 WNBA Finals. Truth is, I don't know doodly squat about either team.

What really took me by surprise is the WNBA Finals themselves are going on. Hell, I didn't even know that league had started their season, let alone played their whole schedules, and gone through playoff eliminations paring it down to the last two teams. How come nobody bothered to tell me this?

After all, for the last few months when the lady hoopsters were evidently playing, I didn't see any games televised, much less media coverage by talking heads, on the Net, or in sports sections of newspapers. I wish they wouldn't keep it such a secret. How are we supposed to know if we'd like that product when they keep it buried deeper than the mythical top-secret file containing all the lurid details surrounding the decades-long torrid love affair between John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi?

I consider myself a well-rounded sports fan. Besides the Big 4 (baseball, basketball, football, hockey) I get into lots of other things. Like golf, tennis, boxing, various forms of automobile racing, track and field, all the Olympic stuff, and once even watched a whole soccer game. As a result of the latter, yours truly even broke new ground in the medical field. The doctors said they'd never seen anybody in a coma and a catatonic state at the same time. But not to worry. After years of rehab, my therapist says those nasty residual twitches will finally go away in just a few more months.

Yes, I dare say most would agree that the girls couldn't come anywhere close to competing with the boys at the highest levels of basketball. All the physical advantages the Y chromosome bunch have would be overwhelming. Bigger, stronger, taller, faster, etc. In any such serious game between the two, the fairer sex would not only get run out of the gym in a dunkathon -- they'd be lucky to score a single basket if the tattooed guys didn't want them to.

Still, the WNBA ladies are highly skilled athletes. They're the best in the world at what THEY do. So how come seemingly nobody pays attention to them?

Beats me. Hopefully next year somebody will clue me in when they're playing. Better yet, if the TV folks would cooperate by actually showing games here and there -- I'd love to check them out. No, not THAT way. Yours truly is a bit long in the tooth to get into all that nonsense about sexting pix of my "sports package" to young girls. That's for certain politicians, not sports bloggers. However, I will admit to having several photos of my yorkies while naked in the hard drive. Them -- not me.

One last thought on the WNBA Finals. The only reason I knew they were going on at all was a video clip that popped up when I signed on earlier today. Yet something else surprised me as I watched it. What was in the background. There was actually a few hundred -- gasp -- fans in attendance. I've seen WNBA games in the past and that NEVER happens. Bless their hearts, but not counting family, friends, and maybe a few twitching people that staggered in after recently watching a soccer game -- these poor girls usually play in empty arenas.

So who WERE those people? Refugees from some civil war in a far away land? There's certainly millions of those looking for a better place to hang out. And c'mon. Even a WNBA game has to beat the heck out of dodging bullets and bombs every day.

I dunno, but rumor has it that the Minnesota Lynx are the best team and will probably win the championship. Yet even their name confounds me. Lynx. I think a lynx is a sort of feral feline, like a cougar -- but these girls are too young to be cougars. Maybe when they get into their 40's they'll develop a whole new, ahem, set of claws and teeth. Then again, the Atlanta Dream seems to be an appropriate name. If the sports fans in Atlanta are expecting a title any time soon in any sport -- dream on.

Idle thought: Combine the names Dream and Lynx and what do you get?

The Drinks. Do they even serve those at WNBA games?

Got me. It's a secret.