Bracketology 101

There comes a point in every girl’s life when she has to make a choice:

To embrace the madness, or not to embrace the madness.

I, for one, embrace the month of March. The promise of spring in the air, the newly found hour of daylight, and of course, this year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. 65 teams (64 now- Mount St. Mary’s beat Coppin State tonight, which I predicted, thank you very much), and an entire month of the best college basketball games of the year for your viewing pleasure.

Oh yes- the RPI’s have been calculated, everyone who cares or has no life has spent the better part of the weekend catching the end of the conference tournaments and trying to see who was “hot” and who was “not” going into selection Sunday.

Let's just clarify one thing, quickly. I'm a girl. I'm a girly girl, if we're going to get specific. The peak of my athleticism is my golf game, I was in a sorority in college, I like to cook, I would be best friends with Nancy Drew and Elizabeth Bennett if they were real people, and I would rather wear a dress than anything else in my closet. Not everyone takes my sports knowledge very seriously- but I also never claimed to know everything.

I just like watching sports- period. Especially basketball.

Many of my female friends who have rolled their eyes at my affinity for college basketball or not paid attention to any of it altogether were suddenly interested this year- many now in the male-dominated financial industry, given the choice between suffering over lunch-hour conversation they won’t understand for 30 days or succumbing to fever, biting the bullet and joining in the office pool. I, for one, happy that a few of my friends finally care, have been e-mailing statistics and predictions to my friends who have solicited my assistance.

AV joined in the fun with me this year, and she’s already sucked in. We both pored over all of the information we’ve collected over the past few days on our coffee table- articles printed and highlighted off of espn.com, the sports section of the Times, random lists and notes made from credible sources, etc.

KR and our friend AR both joined forces and decided to be the only two people in the nation to believe that Gonzaga will win it all. I can live with that- I let KR watch The Gauntlet in peace, and she allows me the same freedom with college basketball. AV enjoys Scrubs, and I’m fairly confident I can speak for KR when I say neither one of us really ‘gets’ that show. We’re all okay with our arrangement- it works for us.

At the end of the day we can all come together and watch American Idol in harmony, and that’s all that really matters. That AND my teams winning… winning also matters.

The field has been set, the numbers are there- all we can do now is sit back, relax and enjoy an entire month of hearing the word “Cinderella” over and over again as that one elusive mid-major team fights through round after round, only to finally get beaten- probably in the Elite Eight- by a team everyone remembers was picked to win anyway.

It’s so beautiful, this month of March. I’m picking UCLA to win it all.

“It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.”
- Seneca the Elder