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The Portland Thorns are ready to take the field for their first regular season game, as they hit the road for a matchup with FC Kansas City on Saturday.

By this time next week, the 2012–13 NBA season will have officially come to an end. After a lockout-reduced schedule last year, the association doled out a full 82-game helping to 30 different fan bases over the past six months, complete with all the requisite stare-downs, petty feuds, confounding press conferences and damn-near-physically-impossible aerial highlights. This latest campaign comes to an end in Portland much as it did last year, with the Blazers exceeding expectations over the first half of the season before methodically confirming them in the weeks following the All-Star break.

This week marks the end of college basketball until the fall and, except for fans of Louisville, we—players included—will be in mourning. Well, maybe except for Brittney Griner, the 6-foot-8-inch center for the Baylor University Lady Bears and AP Player of the Year for the second straight season.

The Houston Dynamo marched onto Jeld-Wen Field under rainy conditions on Saturday, amid the roar of the Timbers’ 37th consecutive sellout crowd. The packed house was eager to see the Portland squad notch its first win in 2013 after three ties and a loss to start the year.

Oregon native Lauran Bliss was a high school student with a dream of going to college anywhere but in the state, but after a quick stint at Texas Tech University the catcher quickly decided that home was where she wanted to be, after all. Now midway through her first season with the Vikings, the freshman has come into her own, already among the Big Sky leaders in several catching categories and a regular starter for the team this year.

FRIDAY APRIL 12 Track and Field Mondo Invite Sacramento, Calif. 8 a.m. Forecast: high of 82 degrees, sunny Men’s Tennis Vikings at Lewis-Clark State College LCSC Tennis Facility Noon NBA…

This spring, get back out into the elements and experience the natural beauty of the Northwest with a hike led by PSU’s Outdoor Program. The Multnomah Falls/Wahkeena Falls day hike is scheduled for Sunday, April 21, covering five miles through the heart of the Columbia River Gorge.

Early season success continued for the Portland State track and field squad at the Willamette Invite over the weekend, as nine athletes came through with qualifying times for the Big Sky Conference Championship in Forest Grove next month.

Extra innings. Overtimes. Shootouts. Sudden death.
In sports, we feel the need to go for the kill, to designate a clear victor and an officially vanquished opponent. Headlines like “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29” are no longer celebrated; the draw has a decidedly negative connotation to it these days, a wholly unsatisfying consolation prize at the end of a hard-fought game.

The Memphis Grizzlies came to the Rose Garden on April 3 for a Western Conference meeting with the reeling Portland Trail Blazers. With both Nicolas Batum and LaMarcus Aldridge out of the lineup for Portland, the Blazers—a team not known for its depth off the bench—started three rookies against a Memphis squad that is headed for the playoffs at the end of the month.

I’ve written a number of times in this column about the misplaced moral outrage of sports journalism. About the grandstanding, the faux sincerity and the self-righteousness that so often seems to accompany serious examinations of sports in our culture. So it’s only fair to applaud the media when they collectively get it right.