In March

It’s that time of year again when, if you hear the `word’ “bracketology" even once more, you start looking for the hills and consider running for them.

Still, despite that word, I love the mayhem of a mad march.

I join bracket groups for the fun of it, no money on the line, and not much in terms of reputation either as I’m usually out, in the men’s bracket, shortly after tip-off of the first game. But I fold up the bracket anyway and check scores now and then. I like the upstarts and the upsets and learning about a college tucked in a corner of a state I haven’t yet visited; I like knowing that a shock of wheat can be a mascot and, while pundits are expounding and mathematicians are devising formulas and sports fans, the crazed and the casual, are bantering back and forth, they’re all filling out brackets by the millions and for a couple of weeks we all go merrily mad together.

Yesterday on Colin McEnroe’s radio show on WNPR, he had Bill Curry, a political analyst and former Democratic nominee for governor, share a bracket that was essentially created entirely from grudges, mostly centered on who did UConn wrong at one time or another (makes sense to me). Meanwhile, Julia Pistell, the director of writing programs at the Mark Twain House and Museum, concocted her own scheme. She researched foods that were either produced or made in that team's state or could be found at a state fair there and she’d pit the two foods against one another. Her thinking was that the players were made up at least in part (perhaps) by these local foods and, also, it was a hoot.

So in one game, it was fried scorpion (sold at a local fair) versus jello. (People in that state consumed the most jello per capita.) The scorpion, she said, would likely trounce the jello. In another face-off, she had emu tacos versus Johnny cakes. McEnroe thought that emus, known to be hard cases and elusive in terms of the chase, would take that game.

http://wnpr.org/post/march-madness-2014

It’s doubtful Pistell willl take home Warren Buffett’s billion dollars, but I kind of like her chances.

What I like best, for all the pontificating, exhorting and cheering, is that it all comes down to a whole bunch of games played by a bunch of college kids, the Creighton guy whose mom, the former college standout, taught him his three-point shot back when he was a kid at the hoop on their garage, or the guy from Providence who plays every minute of every game and the players from Wichita State who haven’t lost yet and, of course, the UConn women. At a party the other night, a friend said that when she wants to teach young kids how to play like a team, especially boys, she tells them, “Just watch the UConn women play."

The college bands will make their music; the mascots will romp; the fans will shout, a group of
kids may summon up something they didn't know they had and a little-known team may make a run. On any given night, anything can happen. I guess that’s why it’s mad but also why it’s magic.