{"id":5343,"date":"2026-04-06T08:23:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T04:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/?p=5343"},"modified":"2026-04-06T06:27:51","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T02:27:51","slug":"worst-of-times-best-of-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/?p=5343","title":{"rendered":"Worst of times, best of times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>They say bad things come in threes.<\/p>\n<p>In a span of 24 hours I lost a basketball pool (thanks, Arizona), lost a Wordle streak, and somehow frittered away the end of my Spring Break.<\/p>\n<p>The cure?<\/p>\n<p>College basketball, MLB, and the Masters all in the same week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>They say bad things come in threes. In a span of 24 hours I lost a basketball pool (thanks, Arizona), lost a Wordle streak, and somehow frittered away the end of my Spring Break. The cure? College basketball, MLB, and &hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/?p=5343\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5343"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5344,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5343\/revisions\/5344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}