Here we go again

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Yet another big weekend for Philadelphia basketball starts in just a few hours with the Big 5 50th Anniversary banquet at the Palestra. It promises to be quite the occasion -- I've heard that nearly 800 former coaches and players have been invited.

In addition to the three games Saturday (apparently there are only around 1,000 tickets left for the Temple-Maryland game), the Palestra will be open again on Sunday for a high school hoops quadrupleheader. The feature game is Oak Hill Academy, the No. 1-ranked team in the nation, versus local powerhouse Episcopal Academy. The company in charge of the operation is the Scholastic Play by Play Network, which brought LeBron James to town a couple years ago. There are still some tickets available for Sunday's event, mainly behind the baskets.

For Penn fans, of course, the focus will rightly be on Saturday night's big game against St. Joe's. While I would rather not normally give advice to fans, I would just like to offer a little bit to the Quakers faithful. One of the first things you learn covering the Hawks is that their student section shows up very, very early, especially to games at the Palestra. It's bad enough that a significant portion of the Penn student section often doesn't arrive at their seats until after tipoff -- a fact which Fran Dunphy even mentioned during The Line last fall -- but it's even worse when it's a Big 5 game and the other side's fans are taunting the lack of people at Penn's end of the floor.

This year would be a great time to reverse that trend, and if you get in early enough you'll probably also bump into some of the many Big 5 legends that will be honored throughout the game and at halftime.

Enjoy the weekend.