Everyone’s a college basketball fanatic today.
Without any basketball knowledge, my mom is filling out a bracket, and even though she helped put my sister and I through Ohio State, and the Buckeyes’ opening-round game is in our hometown of Dayton, Ohio on Friday, she’s actually picking Siena because she likes Crayola crayons.
My Dad is taking the Utah Utes to the Sweet 16 because he loves “My Cousin Vinny.” Did you say Ute?
In between Mah Jongg games my grandma is also filling out a bracket. Grandma, who can make serious money from spinning Dreidel, taught me blackjack as a wee lad in between episodes of He-Man, so I trust her gaming instincts. However, she’s taking Tennessee to the Final Four because head coach Bruce Pearl is a nice Jewish boy, and she’s willing to forgive him for the heinous orange blazer. I’m not.
Despite watching a total of seven minutes of college basketball throughout the year, your better half is filling out a bracket, and he or she will probably smoke you on your 12 vs. 5 upsets. My sister thinks Syracuse is the sugar substitute found in Crystal Light, and I’ll call her an idiot for taking VCU to the Elite Eight, but she’ll probably end up right and I’ll end up a broken man.
Offices are shut down right now from people printing brackets and reading expert analysis from a guy named Digger. Data is not getting entered. Numbers are not getting crunched. The economy still isn’t fixed. Well, nevermind (my proposal for the 100 Senator no-holds-barred Cagefighting Tournament is another blog entirely).
Do you see my point here? This is the most wonderful time of the year for many sports fans. The NCAA Basketball tournament may be the most perfect postseason system in sports. Not only do all 65 teams have a chance at the championship, albeit a miniscule chance for some, but people who don’t normally watch sports get involved in this event.
The tournament has given us so many fantastic underdog stories, it’s hard not to cheer for the team that was prematurely written-off and follow them to the bitter end. Sometimes, you get to witness the amazing buzzer-beater that sets David atop Goliath, like Valparaiso did to Mississippi in the first round of the 1998 tournament. If you’re lucky, you’re even rewarded with the unlikeliest of scenarios, like the number 11 George Mason Patriots making the Final Four in 2006.
There aren’t a whole lot of possibilities for stories like these in other sports. Last year we got a small taste of it in major league baseball, where the Tampa Bay Rays almost did the unthinkable by winning a World Series with a payroll that can be found in the cushions of the Steinbrenners’ couch. It’s hard to make the playoffs in baseball when year after year, the same handful of teams spend enough money on free agents to buy entire planets. Seriously, Hank Steinbrenner just bought the rights to Mars because it may be a fantastic place to harvest young pitching 10 million years from now.
But I digress. I don’t want to bog down this entry with complaints about baseball, or why the BCS will never give us a postseason like March Madness. I want to keep this blog positive because this is the start of the one week of the year where parents may actually watch basketball with their kids, and husbands and wives may not fight over the remote for a change. You’re one of us now, non-sports fans, boohahaha! The smeared pencil on your fingers from organizing the office pool is as telltale a sign as two bite marks on a neck.
You’re bracket crazy, you’re watching the 6 a.m. SportsCenter before work, you know North Carolina has no shot without a healthy Ty Lawson, you don’t know what Zips are but you know they’re from Akron, and now you know a “Diaper Dandy” is not something that follows a meal at Taco Bell There’s just something about the girls at work talking about Tigers, Spartans and Panthers, and not “Gossip Girl.” Welcome aboard, it’s great to have you.
Holy Gonzaga, my 4-year-old nephew just spelled K-R-Z-Y-Z-E-W-S-K-I.
****AG****
