The much-anticipated Pavilion at Ole Miss opened on Jan. 7 after 18 months of excited construction. Hill Drive is no longer blocked off by hard hats and barricades. The collected complex of the Vaught, Manning Center, the track facility and Starnes makes a neat campus-scape, incorporating the colonnaded neoclassical aesthetic of University, Miss. into a slick, imposing mammoth.
The difficulty in describing the full effect of The Pavilion's opening on the experience of Ole Miss basketball arises from a kind of brooding nostalgia for the Tad Pad. That leaky bucket of history was certainly out of date, like much of Mississippi, and in that anachronism rested a certain bit of affection.