After the dust clears from Monday night’s NCAA Basketball championship game, one stellar coach will hoist a national championship trophy that will finally validate his career, thousands of students and alumni from either Kansas or Syracuse will be partying like it’s a medieval Mardi Gras, and know-nothing bracket-fillers across the nation will be pumping their fists because they picked their grandpa’s alma mater, a state they’ve always wanted to visit or the coolest sounding school name to win it all.
Others, like me, will be too busy collecting our jaws from the ground. The Big Dance will finally be over and our pants will have been wetted with more excitement than a 6-year-old who just rode the Goliath on a stomach full of pink lemonade. The NCAA tournament, and college basketball in general, is the sport for sports fans. All of the great things about sports — the intensity of the games, the big shot hit by the benchwarmer who’s only in because of injuries to all five starters, and the surprised look on the faces of fans and players of the analysts’ favorite right after they lose. College basketball is the greatest sport because it is the only real contest in which every team really has a sporting chance.
There are two reasons why someone will watch a sporting event. The first is that the game means something. An average NFL game is more attractive than an average Major League Baseball game simply because there are 10 times more baseball games than NFL games. While I’m a member of the dying breed of the anytime-anywhere baseball fan, I will recommend that for a casual fan, a Saturday is better spent antique shopping with the old lady, if your only other option is to see a doubleheader between the Royals and Devil Rays. Games like these are about as meaningless as a Trent Lott apology.
College basketball games, on the other hand, mean something. There are around 30 games that each team plays. A loss is always more negative than a win is positive, seeing as how only 65 of the 306 Division I teams make it to the tournament. Games are important no matter when they are played. A win may make or break one’s chances to make it to the conference tournament, which in turn affects their chances at making the national tournament. College fans always get hyped up over the games they watch, no matter who their favorite team is playing.
The other big reason for watching a sporting event is the likelihood that either team could conceivably win the contest. You could watch 1,000 games between Preuss School and the 1992 Bulls and never see a Preuss team knock off Jordan and company (or get a single shot for that matter). But the parity in college basketball is deceivably good, especially at tournament time. A conference MVP can have an off night as easy as he can have a 30-point game. Fourteen-point favorites can, and have, fallen apart at the seams when introduced to a neutral site full of fans screaming their heads off for the underdog.
There is no feeling like the first two days of March Madness. You’re confident that your carefully-selected bracket will prove fruitful — this is the year. Bosses are shaking their heads because half of their staff has called in sick to watch the game at home and the other half is wasting time refreshing their browser to catch score updates as they “”look busy”” in their cubicles. By the end of the day, the blue and red paint adorning the face of an Arizona fan is smudged with tears because they choked yet again, my bracket is ripped into shreds cursing the likes of Holy Cross and Colorado for not pulling the upset the gods had promised me, and your obnoxious dead-head roommate is winning your pool. Madness!
And it doesn’t go away! Most of the games turn out to be nail-biters up until the final buzzer sounds. The competition is always in the air, and no one knows it better than Roy Williams and Jim Boeheim, two coaches who have played up their tremendous luck, while trying to shake the nagging upsets that have stood in the way of their national championships. Both have led their teams through the craziness multiple times, and have both made the trip to the finals only to see the Hall of Fame predictions of pundits, presidential phone calls and trips to Disneyland go to the coach on the other bench. The Road to the Final Four is erratic and adrenaline-filled, but the Big Dance always has a winner. Either Williams or Boeheim will learn what its like on Monday night.
The other will stammer off to the locker room cursing the “”parity”” and “”significance”” I speak so highly of. His dance will be over for another year.