The Madness of March

      Didn’t watch a minute of the Super Bowl, not even the Kendrick Lamar part. Didn’t care about the college football playoff championship. Was out of the country for the World Series and can’t quite remember right now who won the NBA finals or the Stanley Cup.

      But boy, do I love March Madness.

      Maybe it’s because I live in a college town, where college basketball is religion, even when the reigning deity has lost some of its divine powers. Maybe it’s because I am in the center of a region that has few professional teams and has historically dominated the sport of college basketball for decades.

      Or maybe it’s because March Madness, the NCAA college basketball tournament, is the one sports event that everyone can feel a part of.

      Sure, yeah, it’s the office bracket pools, usually won by Catherine in accounting who chose her picks based on the relative ferocity of team mascots. (The other year, incidentally, my wife—who knows, almost quite literally, nothing about college basketball, did better than I did in our friends’ bracket challenge because she decided simply for political reasons to pick against all schools based in Florida and Texas.)

      There’s the gambling aspect, too, of course. Now that wagering is the national pastime, everyone wants to take the under or the over or make a prop bet—whatever that is—on how many missed free throws there will be in the second half of the Arkansas vs Kansas first-round game.

      But I think it’s more than that.

      This is the only sporting event where the little guy gets to play the big guy. In football, baseball, hockey, tennis, whatever, it’s always top of the heap against top of the heap. The Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs are both elite, massive organizations. The New York Yankees (payroll: $310 million) played the Los Angeles Dodgers (payroll: $320 million) last fall to determine the best baseball team.

      But in March Madness, you get Lipscomb University, with 4,884 students, playing against Iowa State, with 30,432 students. And how many of us even know where Lipscomb is located? (FYI, it’s Nashville, TN)

      You get Michigan State (student pop: 52,089) going against Smithfield, RI’s Bryant College and its 3,275 students.

      And only during March Madness would a Fairleigh Dickinson, from the basketball hotbed of Teaneck, NJ, and a University of Maryland Baltimore County (from, yes, Baltimore County, and more commonly known as UMBC) even get a chance to compete against the very big boys, teams from Purdue University and the University of Virginia. And when those two little schools did compete, they did something remarkable: they won.

      It’s the equivalent of the Durham Bulls beating the Dodgers, of a small college football team beating the Eagles. It’s something that doesn’t happen in other sports.

      I’ve been watching the tournament for decades. I remember when UCLA won almost every year and when Bird and Magic made the tournament a must-watch event and when Christian Laettner hit the shot.

      I’m hoping for Lipscomb and Bryant this year, even if I didn’t choose them in my brackets.