Last week, I wrote a column about the 12-0, No. 2 ranked women’s lacrosse team. How great they are, how unfathomably awesome they are, and how they’re back on track, headed for a national championship, and how we need to go to all their games to support them.

Now, I have the option of writing about the 12-2, No. 5 ranked women’s lacrosse team.

I first learned about the historic, dreadful Jinx of Sherman in October, 2004. I was visiting my brother, then enrolled at Boston University, and we were at lunch at the storied Boston eatery, The Cheesecake Factory. The New York Yankees, my baseball team of preference, had just trounced the Boston Red Sox – whose home stadium I have urinated on three (three!)times, never because I needed to, just because – and taken a 3-0 lead in the ALCS. And in walked the Yankees ineffable closer, Mariano Rivera. Dumbstruck, I walked over, told him I was a Yankees fan, as if he couldn’t tell from my hat and t-shirt that I always wear all the time when I’m in Boston, shook his hand, and left him alone.

With that same hand, Mo blew a save in Game 4, something he almost never does. I can’t remember the next four days of my life because of something doctors refer to as “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”, but I’m told the Yankees ended up losing three straight to blow the series. (I’m told something similar happened to Stefan Demos after I gave him a late-night kicking foot-only massage during the wee hours of the morning of New Years’ Day, 2010 in Tampa, Fla.) Also, nobody who has ever played me in NBA Street Vol. 2 has ever won, which must be due to me cursing them.

With Northwestern’s freakish knack for having preposterous futility records – longest losing streak, losingest team in the FBS, longest bowl losing streak, just to name a few things I have no intention of mentioning later in the article – some sort of otherworldly hex has to be involved. We don’t have The bambino, The Billy Goat, or The “That Thing that Makes the Clippers Always Suck”, but I have some suggestions.

The curse of Mitch Henderson: A lot of people blame Bill Carmody for the fact that NU is still the only team from a power conference never to make the NCAA Tournament. But guess which assistant coach has worked at Northwestern for the exact same time as Carmody? Yeah, Mitch Henderson. I’m not quite sure what Henderson does: while Tavaras Hardy is billed as NU’s top recruiter, and Ivan Vujic makes sure that we get our fair share of I’ll assume it’s mad nefarious, involves brewing potions, and that it’s the primary reason that Northwestern hasn’t made it to a tournament. However, yesterday, Henderson decided to accept the head job at Princeton in lieu of being a backup to Carmody. I’d put money on an NU Final Four run, now.

Bet you were expecting more examples. Man, maybe if I hadn’t used 400 words talking about myself I’d have had room to make jokes about the jinx of why Northwestern has lost its last 4000 bowl games, but instead this is just a really terrible column.

Sports editor Rodger Sherman is a Medill junior. He can be reached at [email protected]