Essays

I remember my first March Madness office pool. The year was 1992, I was about to leave my teenage years behind. I had just nabbed my first real actual journalism job, working for out-of-state tuition as a junior copy editor at a farming magazine in Oregon. I recall that the whole bracket thing was a strange and off-putting experience.

The keeper of the brackets was one of the publishing partners at the company. His name was Jeff, I think. Jeff was one of the pioneers in "business casual," coming to work every day in a polo shirt with the embroidered logo of some golf course or other. Everywhere he went, he carried a cellular phone the size of a Subway sandwich.

During a weekly meeting (there was no mass e-mail in the Stone Age), he announced that we'd be having, once again, the annual office bracket contest. Ten-dollar fees and completed brackets would be due into him on Wednesday. Everybody knew how it worked, except for a few secretaries. And me.

"So we fill the bracket out, the whole thing?" I asked him privately afterwards, hoping to save myself some public embarrassment.

"Yes, jackass, the whole thing," came the reply. "That's how you win, see."

I'd filled out brackets before, sure, but not like that. And people don't believe me when I say this, but I haven't filled out a bracket like that since 2003. And I know I don't have time -- the deadline's coming up fast -- but I'm going to try and convince you that you shouldn't either. Don't fill out a bracket this week.

I can't think of anything that captures the essence of modern corporate America better than Selection Sunday. Four and a half months of sweat and blood spilled by on-court workers is distilled into numbers and charts, spreadsheets and presentations. Merits are debated by people in suits in a locked room -- it's the ultimate performance evaluation. It's the day when Hoops Nation takes a back seat to Powerpoint Nation.

Yesterday evening, when this season's final flowchart was made public, there was the same mixture of overjoyed jubilance and crushing heartbreak outside that hotel that we see every year. At our level, seasons with disappointing ends were validated and brought back from the dead: we're literally beside ourselves with glee that South Alabama was deemed worthy despite a semifinal exit, as Team USA generated the first two-bid Sun Belt since 1994. We exchanged happy e-mails (with lots of all-caps and exclamation points) with Saint Mary's fans, who will see their team go on to the Dance in the first-ever three-bid West Coast Conference.

But the side of the bubble wall with broken hearts had more of an emotional impact, it always does. Virginia Commonwealth couldn't follow up a regular-season title with a tourney title, and were punished with cold non-inclusion. And nothing was sadder than reading a series of stream-of-consciousness monologues from Illinois State fans, some of which made me dewy-eyed (in a Real Man way, of course). The Redbird faithful spent an entire week creating logical arguments that their team's credentials were NCAA-worthy for the first time in a long decade marked with mediocrity. If you've been living with this team day in and day out all year, then went through the past seven days inside your own head convincing yourself that Cincinnati was a "good win," today it feels like your pet died.

And this is why I hate Selection Sunday. The system of at-large bids, the cottage industry of at-large prediction, the will-they-won't-they that has less to do with basketball than psychological torture. All over a damned committee meeting.

It's never going to end. We might try to fight it, we may try to ignore it, but every year it's going to come back. I'm talking, of course, about the endless debate of what a "mid-major" is and what one isn't. Within the past few weeks, we've had weigh-ins here, here, here and on countless blogs.

What all of these explanations lack -- and this is important -- is that they're all painfully complicated and long-winded, and each has some sort of complicated Rube Goldberg scale of three and sometimes four (!) levels and designations. This may be college, and everyone's all smart and stuff, but it's still basketball -- all of these redrawn maps fail the important 35-second clock test. (Honnnnk!) They also use vague, author-defined conceptions of "expectations," "performance" or "prestige." Give me a break.

Once upon a time there was a tiny little cell, one among a million billion, sloshing and sliding inside a gigantic and vibrant and heaving body. The tiny little cell did its tiny little job as well as it tiny little could, and during its time off it had fun bouncing around with other tiny little like-celled cells, having tiny little conversations on its tiny little cell phone (sorry).

In due course, it was time for the tiny little cell to come of age. It was tiny little puberty time! Inside its tiny little globby cell walls, the tiny little cell was feeling changes -- big changes! Chromatin was condensing, and cytoskeleton microtubules were collapsing! Soon, the tiny little cell had pulled apart from itself and become two tiny little cells, appearing to be exactly the same! This is what tiny little scientists -- great big ones too -- call "mitosis."

It was an easygoing, unassuming late-summer Saturday in Rhode Island. I had completed my weekend house-husband chores (saving the stinky litter boxes for last, as usual), then prepared for a long, languid afternoon of relaxation on the patio. I contemplated the birdfeeder, turning out a few chamber-couplets about finches into a Moleskine. Finally, I switched to the French pop station on the XM radio and tucked into a long novel about cowboys.

Then, far behind me in the house, the phone started ringing. Then again. Custom ringtones in quick-cut edits, like a 20-second rotation from a mad deejay on a scratchy AM radio station.

Before throwing the switch, he gathered his thoughts in the virtual darkness, choosing his words carefully. He didn't know who was out there on the other side -- who his audience would be, whether or not he would be able to find one. If an audience for someone like him even existed. This was something very new, without any sort of market testing, and represented a leap of faith.

And so he leapt, issuing his first missive out into the ether.

I am your voice, the voice of the fan, the everyday Joe who can't afford a beer and a hot dog and shouts bloody murder from the first pitch to the last out because I paid for my ticket and I am entitled! ... I am your best friend and management's worst nightmare! I am... Superfan!

Here's another story we won't have time for later. When I was 12, I went through a phase that most failed child prodigies go through, the fitful burst of youthful creativity and frustration that comes right before the realization that girls are interesting. For me, it manifested itself in a short-lived Dungeons and Dragons addiction.

My PC (player character) was Mitra, a powerful wizard who had attained Level 30 and thousands of HP (hit points). In games at slumber parties and friends' houses, Mitra had earned long lists of abilities and castable spells, with XP (experience points) in the hundreds. His STR (strength) and DEX (dexterity) numbers were off the charts, his CON (constitution) solid, his INT (intelligence) and CHR (charisma) second to few.

In 1995, five years into my stay out in Oregon, I became homesick for the opposite coast, the one I grew up on. The feeling started as confusion and frustration, which grew into a acute sense of not belonging, culminating in a crystalline realization.

I missed hockey.

The New Hampshire boarding school I attended is located on a remote hilltop, in a broadcast television dead-spot and a half-hour's walk from the nearest cash register. Back in the 1980's, before WiFi brought the world together, our only contact points with the real world were the radio and the Boston Globe. Every morning, a forest-green van would drive up, drop off a bundled stack of paper news, and disappear again down the hill.

I had the sports section memorized by 9 a.m., every boxscore and gamecap and pitching probable. Not only did I know exactly what happened in the American sporting world the previous night, I knew what certain people thought about it all too.

Mid-major universities tend to fall in one of three categories. There are the expensive and tiny religious schools in remote and leafy locations, flame-keepers of Christian subsects born out of the Great Schisms. You have your specialized colleges: the teacher's schools, the agriculture and mining institutions, the technicals and polytechnics, the private liberal arts outlets named after dead guys. And then there are the public universities established by state school boards of ed that are intended to serve smaller cities and towns, the ones that had the misfortunes of springing up too far away from the motherships. These directionals and satellites often find themselves living on scraps, with money piped through a tube that is just about as thick as the hyphens in their titles. Or perhaps those represent ten-foot poles.

There's an annual event -- if that's a phrase suitable and grey enough to describe something that doesn't cut it as a tradition -- here in our household. Every year around this time, the satellite television company beams in a solid week of unlimited American professional basketball in a free preview of the "NBA League Pass." This, to me, is like our neighborhood drug dealer saying that it'll be the second dose of snortable laxative cut with Drano that's going to cost you. If we had neighborhood drug dealers in Pawtucket, R.I., that is.

First, this. In mid-August, I was inside a cube-shaped Pilot Travel Center alongside an otherwise barren and remote stretch of northern Pennsylvania. That's where I met someone who might be the tallest truck stop employee in America.

He must have been about 6-foot-8, at the very least. The mop he pushed looked like a popsicle stick in his mammoth hands. I had to interrupt him cleaning up a spill near the soft drink cooler because I couldn't find the creamer or sugar for the coffee. He pointed clear across the store, near the newspapers. He made a good-natured joke about the floor plans, one he's probably found himself delivering a thousand times, so I angled in for a question.

LOS ANGELES -- This one's for the old-timers, the folks who have been following the journey from its humble beginnings two and a half years ago. You know who you are.

There's a secret I've been keeping from you (shhhh...), or rather it's part of the story that didn't fit well inside the 30-second capsule that I've worked to fit within the average attention span or feature story structure. You know that I cut my teeth on big-boy basketball in Oregon in the early Nineties, then moved on to Drexel in the late part of the decade, where I fell in love with the mid-majors. What I left out was my connection with the Anteaters of California-Irvine.

PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- I'm not a complainer by nature, not at all. I don't gripe about primetime television becoming a lowest-common denominator toilet, or that Kenny G did a lite-jazz cover of James Blunt's "You're Beautiful," unknowingly creating the audio skeleton-key to hell's gates in the process. I don't kvetch about how impossible it is to find 40-long suits in stores, much less pants in 32x34. And I don't even bitch about the fact that I've spawned cheap imitations.

No, there really wasn't too much to complain about in 2006 in Hoops Nation&trade, with mid-major basketball exploding everywhere like little toy cannons filled with delicious candy. Programs outside the 50 or so that you always hear about are winning games against those programs, and it's happening more often. The game, our game, continues to prove its resilience against me-first selfishness and blingonomics with teams like Butler, which slays giants by finding open shooters and doing little things like making free throws and keeping turnovers low.

There's a debate raging in Hoops Nation, one that has very little relevance whatsoever to anything relevant. It's supposed to be about respect, honor and parity. It should be about ball control, free throws and the flex offense. And sure, it's about basketball -- a little bit -- but it's also about television and eyebrows.

This is a debate about what a mid-major is and what it isn't... but at its very root, it's really about which teams are in The Club and which teams it's okay for the media to ignore.

One thing you can never say about our game is that it overstays its welcome.

For all but the lucky pocket of players and fans whose season didn't end in a meaningful loss, college basketball is quickly forgotten, gone, off the radar. For some, it's the pull of the new baseball season, but for most it's just time to go outside again.

INDIANAPOLIS, Apr. 2 -- There are huge signs all over town -- on airport walls, strung over streetlights, over the main gate to the RCA Dome. They all read, "The Road Ends Here."

There's also a giant logo on the side of the 45,000-seat venue, a green and gold star with zag-zigging trailers that has never been reproduced in this size in the two years of its use, much less the nearly four decades the school it represents has existed. It's the mark of George Mason University, the surprise mid-major school among the humdrum Other Three.

This is the 9th in a series of 10 early-season essays.

"A dream is a wish your heart makes," it's said, "when you're fast asleep." That's nice and everything, but why does Disney have the market cornered on all that dewy fantasyland crap?

This is 8 in a series of 10 early-season essays.

Yeah, you, buster. You're as guilty as the next one. There's nobody around, it's okay to admit it - it's happened to you too.

Here's the scene: you're sitting at the sports bar, watching the sports ticker out of the corner. There it is - a score that sticks out like a sore thumb. You do a double-take, your mind racing to fit this mammoth upset into some type of context. You blurt out, "Holy s**t, did you see that? Sacred Heart beat Syracuse by 27?"

This is 7 in a series of 10 early-season essays.

Karl Marx was a smart guy, he had some revolutionary ideas about class struggle and stuff. But even though the East German city named in his honor would field a dominant women's team named the Karl-Marx Stadt Chem Cats, the father of modern communism didn't know s**t about basketball.

He had a valid excuse, though - the game wasn't invented until eight years after he died. But if ol' bushy-beard had ever had the chance to witness aVillanova-http://schools.basketballstate.com/MTSU >Middle Tennessee game, he would have recognized a genius economic model when he saw it. Maybe he would have opened a popcorn stand instead of writing all those manifestos.