It’s hard to ask college students to step back and put things in perspective. We are the Internet Generation that demands things swiftly and loses patience easily. Every year when March Madness begins, brackets circulate around Northwestern’s campus and TVs are all tuned to college basketball, but the Wildcats are never playing and that frustrates your general sports fan who saw an NU team beat No. 4 Purdue, then lose to Penn State (twice), Indiana and Iowa. A second straight NIT bid isn’t good enough for most sports fans in Evanston. And when you tell a sports fan about the great accomplishment of the women’s basketball team reaching the WNIT-NU’s first postseason berth since 1997-they are not impressed.

It’s all about baby steps, people.

While it’s great that both programs have reached the point where people can have higher expectations, it diminishes what they have accomplished to not put both seasons in perspective of their recent histories. I’m not talking about the ‘70’s or ‘80’s; I’m referring to the seasons three and four years ago, respectively.

Let’s start with the women’s team, a Cats squad that won one conference game in 2007 and 2008, and then won seven games last year in coach Joe McKeown’s first season. His incredible coaching abilities and experience finally gained results this year as they made it to the postseason for the first time in 13 years, winning their first two games of the Women’s NIT to advance to the Sweet 16 before falling to Michigan. “It’s a huge stepping stone for the school and I’m just really happy for our players,” McKeown said after NU’s first round victory over Duquesne. He understands where this team has come from, and while most students don’t think they should get excited over a WNIT bid, with McKeown’s recruiting, an NCAA bid could come as early as next season.

When Butler manhandled a Kevin Coble-less NU team back in November, I was desperately hoping for a postseason berth for the Cats, even if it was in one of the secondary tournaments like the CBI. But when NU started 10-1, beat Purdue and Illinois at home and Michigan on the road, the dream of seeing NU flash across the screen on Selection Sunday was back into focus. Then embarrassing losses to Penn State, Indiana and Iowa killed that dream. It was that debilitating end to the season that gave the Cats a very small TV audience around campus for their first round NIT game, and most people didn’t feel the season merited excitement over a consolation postseason tournament bid.

Baby steps.

“You have 96 teams still playing out of 347, and we’re one of them,” said coach Bill Carmody after the announcement of the NIT bid. “We’re excited about doing it, especially for this team, this year.” If Carmody and the players appreciate the importance of a second consecutive NIT bid without Coble, shouldn’t we, as their classmates and biggest fans, support them? Shouldn’t we realize where this program has come from-just one Big Ten win two years ago?

This was a team without its leading scorer and rebounder in Coble and its top sub in Jeff Ryan. Freshmen and sophomores made up 60 percent of the team’s playing time on the season, and there was not much of a bench for the Cats. Yet they won a school-record 20 games, made it to the postseason for back-to-back seasons for the first time ever, compiled the most wins in a two-year span in school history, and fans refuse to be excited about the NIT bid.

Considering the futility displayed by both basketball teams the past decade, NIT bids should be celebrated, not put down; you can’t expect a single-season-miracle like the 1995 Rose Bowl in basketball. The football team has had enough winning seasons to have consistently high expectations, but basketball isn’t there yet. The NCAA bids will come soon, maybe even next year, but for now, it’s still baby steps.

Sports columnist Kevin Fishbain is a Medill senior. He can be reached at [email protected].