I see North Carolina has become the 31st state to pass an amendment defining marriage as a heterosexual union, ostensibly to "preserve the sanctity of marriage."

In reality, this preserves nothing but fear and bigotry. We'll live to see these amendments overturned. But in the meantime, I say we go all in on the idea of preserving the sanctity of marriage. I think those 31 states that have the heterosexual marriage amendments should also take the following steps:

Last week I was at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort on the Oregon coast. Parts of the five courses there are built on massive sand dunes that rise above the Pacific Ocean. The dunes are alive, and always on the move. As a result, one of the courses will be closed for a while this fall for renovations. Bulldozers will undo some of Mother Nature's changes to the land, part of the ongoing coexistence between man and the elements.

In every sport, in every era, there is the exception to the rule: the one who Does Things Differently. Think Barry Sanders darting laterally instead of lowering his shoulders and running between the tackles, or Fernando Valenzuela looking skyward before mowing down another hitter. Now the sporting gods have given golf Bubba Watson, Masters Champion. And it is good.

There's so much more room for unique styles in the individual sports, but golf has gone the way of tennis in the 1980s and 90s: Get the promising kids to an academy, where they'll be compressed and extruded to the same specifications as their immediate predecessors. The overall quality of competition will rise, but the character of the game becomes stunted. Save for the brand endorsements and colors of their clothes, everyone looks the same.

Tennis thrives on uniformity, but golf requires personality and creativity. You don't always get a perfect lie, and you don't get a second serve. Because Bubba was completely self-taught, trial and error is his default mode. When he finds himself 60 yards into the trees with a blind shot off pine straw, he's been there before. And he figured it out on his own. He's not thinking about clubhead angles or swing planes; he's thinking, "Sure, I can hook my pitching wedge 40 yards. Whap!" And he's giving hope to every self-taught player grinding out nine holes in a beer league or wearing out the synthetic turf at the driving range. If Bubba can win the Masters swinging out of his shoes and hitting a pink driver, why can't I drive the green on No. 4 wearing tennis shoes and playing a yellow X-out?

Maybe Bubba is an interesting diversion, a one-hit wonder who'll be this generation's Fred Couples: The guy every golfer wants to be, even if he doesn't actually win as much as his talent would suggest. If that's the case, there are worse things for Bubba and the game. But I think we might be seeing the emergence of this generation's Lee Trevino: The guy who learned the game on his own, figured out how to hit every kind of shot you could ever need, and provided an earthy foil to his more pedigreed contemporaries. Either way, I hope Bubba stays Bubba instead of getting assimilated into the golfing hive mind. I hope he stays foolish, and stays away from Butch Harmon and Sean Foley.

If you love baseball and golf, you don't often see a day like this. The first round of the Masters and Opening Day sharing a spot on the calendar, two great sports starting on the same day. (OK, the PGA Tour started in January and MLB played three forgettable games for marketing purposes before today; can we all agree that today's the day things got real? I thought so.)

If you love baseball and golf, today is like having a birthday. Another Masters, another Opening Day, another chance to take stock of another year gone by. Looking back before looking ahead. I still expect to see Gene Sarazen, Sam Snead and Byron Nelson hitting ceremonial tee shots at Augusta National, but now it's the Big 3 first on the tee Thursday morning. Arnold Palmer still smiling and joking, the coolest kid on the block, even if his follow-through gets noticeably shorter every year. Jack Nicklaus a little more hunched over, but so determined over the ball, looking like he might will the ball 300 yards down the sprinkler line. And Gary Player, looking ... well, looking like he still does 10,000 sit-ups and plays 36 a day, which I'm pretty sure he does. North, at Comerica Park, the Tigers brought out No. 6 himself, Al Kaline, to throw out the first pitch. It makes you wince a bit to see his soft toss to the plate, knowing he once gunned down runners with no-hop rockets from Tiger Stadium's right field corner. But like Sarazen, Snead and Nelson, and Palmer, Nicklaus and Player, this is part of the sad and glorious passing of time. We're lucky to have had them in their prime, and still have them today.

If you love baseball and golf, today is about reestablishing the rhythms of spring and summer. Everyone's a contender. Anything's possible. Even if you lose, you play again tomorrow.

If you love baseball and golf, today is a day where your heart is full. Today is a day where there is crying in baseball, and there is crying in golf, and that's OK. As long as the tears are rolling toward a smile.

The Cardinals played tough D, pressing more to wear down MSU's ball-handlers than to create turnovers (though it accomplished that in spades, thanks to some real carelessness and lazy passing). Then it packed in the zone and dared the Spartans to make an outside shot, or take on mini-Manute Bol (Gorgui Dieng) on a drive to the hoop. MSU didn't have an answer for either. Louisville made MSU's offense look like the worst-case scenario some of us feared early in the season, when it wasn't clear how this year's team could score enough to win. The Cardinals played Big 10-level defense, and the Spartans ran out of gas.

Maybe having Branden Dawson would have helped; he's probably the only Spartan who could have attacked Dieng on a slash from the wing. But in the one-and-done NCAA Tourney, you get hot or you go home. The Spartans gutted out a pair of wins last weekend, but Louisville is on a roll. And, speaking of Dawson, last night affirms my belief in my self-formulated Law of Basketball Injuries: When a team loses a key player to injury, it often plays as well or better for a while. "A while" is about five games. Last night was MSU's sixth game without Dawson.

As a fan, it's tough to see Draymond Green play his last game in such a disappointing loss. He did become MSU's all-time leading rebounder with his 16-board performance, but that's cold consolation. Even if Day Day didn't win an NCAA title during his four years, he's still up there with Magic and Mateen in the Spartan pantheon – it was a joy to watch him play, because you could tell that's his feeling on the court.
Now the torch passes: It's Keith Appling's team now. Or maybe it's Gary Harris' team, or Denzel Valentine's, or Matt Costello's – though freshmen seldom star on Izzo-coached teams. Losing Green will leave a huge hole, but between three star recruits and a lot of young players who got some good experience this year, 2012-13 might look more like reloading than rebuilding. That's going to help ease the sting from last night's loss. (If I keep telling myself that, eventually it will be true. Right? Please?)

The Spartans won't get a lot of style points for their opening victories in the NCAA Tournament, but that's to be expected. This team seldom summons a full game of pretty play, with the regular season blowouts of Purdue at home and Ohio State on the road standing as this year's exceptions to the rule. As a first-round opponent, LIU-Brooklyn was far from the typical deer-in-the-headlines 16 seed. In the second round, St. Louis packed in the defense as expected and made the game a slog.

I didn't have a real rooting interest in yesterday's Apple event. It was pretty certain to be about a new iPad and a new Apple TV box, and I have the previous editions of each. I didn't think Apple had much of a chance to get into my wallet, and I was right. (There were a few moments of weakness, but they quickly passed.)

I was interested in the new products, but I was really watching for ancillary developments: Software updates, new apps – things I could use with my iPad 2 and not-new Apple TV. These were my takeaways:

• I like the switch to a non-numerical product naming convention for the iPad line. I'm sure Apple will follow suit with the iPhone, which is pretty much how they've handled all the Macs (since dropping the Powerbook names; remember the old Quadra 8420-style names?) and iPods (since getting past iPod Photo). From now on it's just iPad, iPhone, etc. If you need to know which one, you add a (year it was made) afterward. Complicated in the short term, where you have "The new iPad" and the iPad 2 sharing shelf space. I think people will figure it out. In the long term, much smoother. Helps you avoid the future iPad 12 Epic Pro HD 4G LTE Ultra Plus edition. 

• If I was buying an iPad, I'd get the new one, not the cheaper-by-$100 iPad 2. The faster guts and retina display are worth it. That said, I wouldn't trade in my current iPad 2 to upgrade. Though I do wish I had more than 16 GB of space. Credit card, get back in your place! 

• Same with the Apple TV. A small upgrade to 1080HD video from 720; not worth an upgrade – but if you have an iPad or iPhone and don't have an Apple TV, you should. 

• The new Apple TV software update makes your TV look like a giant iPod or iPhone. Kind of disorienting, and very cool. 

• The iOS 5.1 update fixed some annoying bugs, but added a funny twist: In AT&T HSPA+ territory (their fastest flavor of old 3G technology) the signal now reads as 4G instead of 3G. It might technically be true, but having a beefed-up number with the same sometimes-glacial throughput is another facepalm moment for AT&T. 

• The real 4G capability of the new iPad is sweet, and pretty cost-effective. If I was buying a new iPad and had the $130 premium Apple charges for the built-in cellular coverage, I'd bite. You can always load up apps like Instapaper with things to read when a WiFi-only iPad is out of wireless range, but I can see getting more utility out of one with ubiquitous broadband. 

• The new iPhoto program for the iPad (and some models of iPhone) is a bit befuddling. Much more complex than most Apple apps. Without the tutorial mode, I'd be lost. Looks like it has a lot of good things going for it, but I'm not used to there being a learning curve to editing photos. 

After a year of iPad ownership, I can still say that it's a great device and I use it all the time. It's unmatchable as a web-browsing/reading device, and it serves me well as a writing rig and for email and games. But it can't replace an actual computer for my work, and it isn't as essential as my iPhone. I'm lucky to have all three of those tools, but if I had to lose one, it'd be the iPad. (Until my eyes get a little worse, when a screen less than 10 inches is going to be useless.) So color me impressed by the ongoing incremental improvements to an already excellent product. But my credit card rests safely until "The new iPhone" comes out of hiding this fall.

The 2011-12 Michigan State men's hoops season is a paradox: It has the potential to be simultaneously successful beyond expectations and a tremendous letdown.

Not much was expected from this team, which lost so much talent and firepower (Kalin Lucas, Durrell Summers, Chris Allen, Korie Lucious) over the past season-and-half. Subtract ever-injured forward Delvon Roe and incoming freshman Dewan Anderson before this season started and you had the makings of a rebuilding year. If you'd have offered a winning conference record and a five seed in the NCAA Tournament prior to the season, I think most Spartan fans would have taken it. Throw in an All-America season from Draymond Green? Inconceivable.

Viewed from that angle, a shared Big Ten regular season title and a probably two seed in the NCAA Tourney is a wild success. We're playing with house money, men!

Except it suddenly looks like what could have been much more now has a chance to be much less. Losing the last two games of the season to fall into a three-way tie with those other two schools (What are they calling each other this week? "Ohio" and "Southern Michigan"?) stinks; you always want to step on the other guy's necks when the chance presents itself. But the bigger picture shows a team that could have been a true contender for a national title taking a huge injury blow on the eve of the postseason.

Branden Dawson's torn ACL (could it be the mere presence of Delvon Roe on the bench?) hurts more for next year than this one, I think. It absolutely hurts the depth for this season's tournament play, both Big Ten and NCAA. The games are all about guard play this time of year, and Dawson had finally figured out how to get a good defender against wing players. See what happened after he left the OSU loss – a 13-point lead becomes a loss.

I think Tom Izzo will do a good job papering over as best he can. Derrick Nix has been a revelation the last few weeks – the talent's been there, but not the conditioning or desire. Now that the big fella sees what he can accomplish, I think he gives the team a completely different dimension to work with, which will help Izzo's game-planning. And you know Green is going to play like a man possessed.

The key will be getting Brandan Kearney and Alex Guana to play some meaningful minutes. If Mike Kebler was OK being on the court for serious minutes last year, those two can more than hold their own. They're going to need Guana to provide another body and five fouls inside, and Kearney to spell Brendon Wood and Austin Thornton. I really think Kearney could step up big-time; the kid can play some tough D. Truthfully, this team was and is going to go as far as Keith Appling allows it to go. If the team defense can hold up and Appling regains his confidence on offense, things will be OK. If teams exploit Wood and Thornton the way OSU did yesterday, MSU's chances of a long tourney run will be smaller than LeBron James' man purse.

For next year, Dawson's injury could be really terrible. Maybe he'll be a fast healer and be able to contribute next year, but you can't count on that. Some ACL injuries are healing in 6-8 months now; others still take 12-14 months. And look at Delvon Roe's sad story. It might be better to just write off next year and have Dawson come back healthy as a sophomore in 2013-14. But that really takes a weapon away from the Spartans for next year, even with the three big frosh guns (Denzel Valentine, Gary Harris and Matt Costello) on the way.

But there will be time to worry about that in October. In the meantime, we'll know soon enough whether MSU's 2011-12 season was a success, a letdown, or both.

Yes, I love nearly all of the shiny gadgets Apple makes. But the thing that really keeps our family in the Apple groove is the great customer service on the company's products. In my decade of working from home, the Genius Bar has been my main source of IT help. Beyond simply fixing things, the customer service staff doesn't try to upsell you. Today provides an excellent example: My lovely wife's MacBook appeared to be mortally wounded. After I exhausted all my at-home IT knowledge and Google-fu, we made an appointment at the Twelve Oaks Apple Store. The Geniuses were able to save and backup all the hard drive's data, then managed to troubleshoot the problem (a corrupted file) and get the machine back in working order.

There was probably about an hour's worth of work performed at the Genius Bar on a four-year-old MacBook that is more than a year past its warranty. It would have been easy for one of the reps to tell us the hard drive was dying, and our best course of action was to buy a new computer right now. Instead, they fixed it and gave me a step-by-step on how to install a new hard drive on my own to extend the life of the MacBook. We paid nothing for the service.

This pays off for Apple because the next time we do need to buy a computer, that's where it's going to come from. In the short term, a day that started with what appeared to be a computer catastrophe – months of work and personal data lost, plus a probable purchase of a $1,200 replacement computer – ended with smiles and sighs of relief. That's genius.