CLEVELAND -- Just as you don't need to put lipstick on the P.I.G., Championship Fortnight doesn't need any pretty dressing. It's compelling competition that sells itself. March basketball is elimination basketball, and we need to get 31 from 347 before we whittle 65 down to a single champion.

It's not difficult to find an emotional connection with the participants, because we share something in common. We love basketball, right? The players and coaches love Our Game more, certainly -- they've turned over their lives and livelihoods to it, to the sacrifice of nearly everything else... and we all understand loss. When a team is eliminated, it doesn't get to play basketball anymore, and that's sad.

That's what hooks me, right there. These two weeks are full of victory, tragedy, romance and death, death, death. Over and over, superior and cunning organisms destroying weaker and unlucky ones. Dreams live and die every two hours. Isn't that enough?

Whether one accepts all of this mid-major stuff at face value or not represents our far outer border. It separates the readers and the non-readers, you right now and all those who have drifted away over the seasons. Our year is beautiful, and it doesn't need further explanation or apology.

Bullet Points

• Upsets! Congratulations to our unexpected champions from last night, as Robert Morris repeated in a sticky NEC final at top-seeded Quinnipiac, and Montana engineered a comeback for the Championship Fortnight ages in the Big Sky. The No. 4-seeded Grizzlies were down by 20 at halftime to No. 1 Weber State, and rode Anthony Johnson's 42 points to a thrilling come-from-behind bid robbery.
  
• Higher seeds were 11-5 on Wednesday. In addition to the title game upsets, SWAC No. 1 Jackson State was sent to the NIT by Grambling State. Great West No. 6 New Jersey Tech moved on to the semifinals, and No. 5 Texas-Pan American beat No. 4 Utah Valley on the Wolverines' own floor.
  
• No title games tonight, so catch your breath. Welcome to the WAC, which will play its quarter slots in Reno. The Southland moves on to semis, the Big West is in its second round, and the SWAC plays out its other two quarterfinals. The MAC gets its final eight on in Cleveland.
  
• There are 16 elimination games today.

How ya doin'? Did your team win, did it lose? Come join in a special mid-week chat on Wednesday at 2 PM ET to discuss all the weird wonders that encompass Championship Fortnight.

One makes for a one-off, but two constitutes a tradition. It's now unthinkable to end Season 6 without having our friends from Storming The Floor over during Championship Fortnight, to discuss one of the most hallowed of all college basketball rituals: the taking of the court. Our First Annual Floor-Storming Symposium occurred one year ago; welcome, now, to the Second.

Marco Anskis and Eric "Extra P." Angevine wrote the rules on storming the floor many years ago, a living document that changes and transmogrifies with each college basketball annum. And in this topsy-turvy 2009-10 season, fans have looked to them to arbitrate disputes on when to and when not to. We discussed the evolution of the art and craft of storming, new rules that have been put in place this year, and disturbing new crackdowns on these acts of simultaneous and barely-organized hardwood takeovers. We also talked about storming at an advancing age, the First Time vs. the next bunch of times, court-rushing at the NCAA Tournament, and the shocking in-plain-sight robbery of STF's prized rulebook by a deranged sportzopath.

Also this year, we have a special new addition to the Symposium proceedings. We put out a call for your court storming stories, and you responded. We've included a few of them here, interspersed with the Q&A, to offer some added perspective on the anticipation, fear, regret, vindication and relief that are all bound up in this Championship Fortnight experience. And, also, the explosive joy that happens when the emotional investment in a basketball team finally pays off.

TMM: A lot's changed since the inaugural FSS last year. For one thing, we're all older and farther away from our court-storming prime. And there have literally been like 6,000 college basketball games since then. What's the state of Hoops Nation, as far as floor storming goes?
 
Eric: Storming is getting cheaper by the week. I was asked my opinion on this by the Charlotte Observer earlier during a week when South Carolina, Western Carolina, and Charlotte had all stormed early in the season. It now looks very likely that none of those teams will make it to the NCAA tournament. Of course, that's been the argument levied on us by Twitter fiends. People are saying "we don't get to celebrate much, let us have our fun." This is the kind of thinking that's going to land us in a 96-team tournament. Special wins are rare; storming should be also.

Marco: I think the biggest change is the overall public awareness of what is considered a legitimate storming and what is considered garbage - which has its pros and cons. A pro is that you that  you now can have student section leaders in normally-rowdy Kansas State convincing jacked-up students not to take the floor in a win over No. 1 Texas because they were a Top 10 team and didn't need to storm the floor. I'll go to my grave thinking that the STF rules had an influence on that decision at K-State. A major con is that I can't watch a court storming on SportsCenter ever again without someone questioning whether it's a legitimate storming or not.

Bullet Points

• Three champions were crowned on Tuesday night. Please give it up for: Butler of the Horizon League, which crushed Wright State in that league's title game; the Sun Belt's North Texas, which has now split the last four championships with Western Kentucky; and Oakland, long-suffering G'Grizzlies of the Badlands Conference. We salute you all!
  
• The MEAC first round played out in Winston-Salem with a minor upset (No. 9 N.C A&T over No. 8 Howard), but the Atlantic 12 provided a true shock. Charlotte, a real contender for an NCAA at-large back in January, completed its collapse by losing as a No. 5 seed to No. 12 UMass.
  
• Higher seeds were 7-4 on Tuesday.
  
• The Big Sky's semifinals produced a Wednesday pairing of top seed Weber State and Montana, a No. 4 that upset the second-seeded BEAR BEDLAM of Northern Colorado. Also on the SNL schedule for this evening is the Northeast championship: Robert Morris at Quinnipiac.
  
• But that's not all! Four tourneys swing into action tonight: the Big West first round at Anaheim, the Southland quarterfinals at Katy, Texas, the SWAC quarters at Shreveport, La. (two of them), and the inaugural Great West opening round.
  
• The MEAC continues with three quarterfinals. Also today in W-S, it's High School Day. There will be a College Fair in the morning and an unrelated Meet and Greet Mixer tonight, for MEAC alumni who have already been to college. The seasons of our lives.
  
• And with that, each of Hoops Nation's tourneys are either under way or completed. There are 16 elimination games tonight.