Watching both the Mets and Tigers move on and listening to Syracuse lose to Pitt, I was struck by a couple of things. First, how the degree of idleness you can achieve on a weekend is enhanced by a headachy cold. Second, how orange is a singular colour.

I have a few theories about colour that have been with me for a long time. Colours are related in my mind with numbers, for example. One is clearly yellow in my mind. I don't know how related with is to pool and snooker. I seem to think my number-colour thing predates my relationship with these games. But orange does to fit into the scheme. Plus colours remind me of era. Orange, like purple, is from the 70s. But orange is a highschool colour while purple is elementary school. Oh, yea. That's another one of the associations I make. I also figure orange is fairly 1910. I don't think purple was invented back then.

I started thinking about orange when watching the Tigers hammer the Yankees - or at least the people who were on the Yankees yesterday - when the announcers noted that it's a team colour not on the home uniform. For Tigers that's reasonable. But it's also a trim colour for the Mets - which I understand to be a nod to the trim of the Giants, former denizens of Gotham as well. While red and blue rule as they also do in British soccer, there's actually quite a bit of orange in baseball with the Orioles and Houston - certainly more than day NHL hockey. While the Houston Astro's orange has also morphed into a weird cranberry, Philidelphia somewhat cornered the market in hockey orange. By comparison, no team has cornered the market in purple. Teams have abandoned purple, the most noteworthy being the LA Kings. Teams that keep purple collapse. Teams that have orange have zing. Teams that have purple are goofs. Orange warns, purple wallows.

Syracuse has also cornered orange having orangeness in the abstract as its identity. But they lost. The Mets and Tigers both clinched their opening rounds yesterday with their orange in check.