The new Maples Pavilion, ladies and gents, the eighth wonder of the world! Who wasn’t skeptical about the multimillion dollar recreation of our much-loved basketball arena? Granted, Classic Maples had its problems (crammed seating, labyrinthine stairway structure, lack of a gigantic TV-Scorecard-MegaCube hanging from the heavens) but conversely, it DID have . . . well, change is hard on anyone.

But surprise! Neo-Maples has everything the old Maples didn’t and still FEELS like the place where I grew up watching players like Adam Keefe, Brevin Knight and Casey Jacobsen, to say nothing of patriarch Mike Montgomery. At the same time, there’s so much pleasure to be had from enjoying all the new bits: the upper lights shutting off during gametime, the refined stairway structure, that classy inside-outside outer layer and the TV-Cube.

Yet the metaphorical new-car smell began fading at the first major home game, when the nice men directing us to the student seats explained we were going to have to get very, very cozy. In a structural mistake shocking in its idiot audacity, members of the Sixth Man Club have been crammed onto relatively thin bleacher-steps, two rows per level. In theory, this probably sounded like a grand idea. I’m sure a heartless plutocrat in the back office got paid a hefty Thanksgiving bonus for coming up with this one. Good for him.

Except that, like the Flat Earth and the Piltdown Man, the theory doesn’t hold. Instead, in the midst of a massively huge Neo-Geo remodel, the Sixth-Man section seems almost like an afterthought. The other sections have all been refitted with cushions, space, aesthetically-pleasing design and improved visibility; no doubt this makes the alumni (or, as we at Commumission like to call them, “the bourgeois pigs”) quite happy. Meanwhile, we students get a few stair-platforms masquerading as bleachers. Luxuries like personal space, clear stairways for exiting, air that doesn’t smell like sweat and sitting down during halftime have all been lost in the corporate shuffle.

Whatever. We’re students, and fans; we can deal. But there’s another structural flaw, though most students probably don’t know about it. In contrast to the old baskets, which hung down majestically from the ceiling, the new ones stand lazily on the floor. The happy few who paid full price for their seats behind the basket thus miss roughly 90 percent of the game; when there’s a free throw, they can’t even see who’s shooting. The people beyond the remodel almost certainly knew how much the new baskets would obstruct the audience’s view, but rather than find a solution or at least lower the prices on the seats, they completely ignored the problem.

In all likelihood, nothing can really be done at this point about either issue. The Sixth Man Club occupies a lot of space that would be sold off to season ticket holders but for the whims of the administration; it can scarcely be expected to bite the hand that feeds it. And the few angry fans behind the basket pale in comparison to the large majority that’s quite satisfied with Maples version 2.0. Which, to return to my original point, is very new and very cool. But the novelty will eventually fade, and the utterly needless, utterly thoughtless tragic flaws hidden below the glitzy veneer of Maples Pavilion will remain.