{"id":7857,"date":"2018-11-20T16:21:05","date_gmt":"2018-11-20T21:21:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/2018\/11\/20\/a-surreal-feeling\/"},"modified":"2022-11-06T20:04:10","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T01:04:10","slug":"a-surreal-feeling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/a-surreal-feeling\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cA surreal feeling\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On Saturday, Nov. 17, the Furman men\u2019s basketball team stunned defending national champion and eighth-ranked Villanova, 76-68. A week prior to that, the Paladins defeated Loyola-Chicago, 60-58. Both teams reached the Final Four in last year\u2019s NCAA tournament.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was quite a surreal feeling,\u201d said senior Matt Rafferty, who is averaging 18.2 points, 9.2 rebounds and 4.8 assists for the 5-0 Paladins. \u201cIt really still hasn\u2019t hit me.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Rafferty graduated from Hinsdale Central High School near Chicago, and the <strong><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.chicagotribune.com\/sports\/college\/ct-spt-furman-upsets-matt-rafferty-hinsdale-20181120-story.html\">Chicago Tribune<\/a><\/em><\/strong> checked in with Hinsdale\u2019s all-time leader in rebounds, blocks and steals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Saturday, Nov. 17, the Furman men\u2019s basketball team stunned defending national champion and eighth-ranked Villanova, 76-68. A week prior to that, the Paladins defeated Loyola-Chicago, 60-58. Both teams reached [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":7858,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-the-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}