Season EpiloguesSeriously, what's the big deal about fearlessness? It's made out to be this incredible and rare trait that only a select few possess. People forget that it's our natural, default state of being. We enter the world too naive to fear anything; over time, we develop a profile of all that scares us. Some spend their lives figuring out what's on their own checklists. Some play twisted games with fear. They put themselves in uncomfortable, disruptive situations that press that fear button, set their bloodstream awash in life-affirming adrenaline and cortisol. Throughout history, entire nations have been manipulated into fearful submission with laws and religions. In modern times, there's an entire fear industry, countless chairs facing countless couches. The hired friend leans in close, asks countless variations of the question, "What, exactly, are you afraid of?" Fear is often triggered by something outside that activates the mechanism inside. Sometimes we fear that something inside will betray us. There is fear of the invisible and unknown, fear of the physically present, dangerous and looming. There is the panic that engulfs and immobilizes, as well as the phobia that propels into performance. But all fears have one thing in common. Nobody's afraid of things that have already occurred. If one is running from the past, it's only because of a fear of repetition -- worse, bigger, more damaging this time. The object of fear is always somewhere in the future. Fear is of the end. PAWTUCKET, R.I., Mar. 28 -- All animate organisms, from the globbiest amoeba to the most intricate human machine, share one thing in common: life. Life is what keeps you going, it's the light before the beginning of the tunnel. The meaning of life is simply this: it means so much that nobody can survive without it. Every season, the 337 college basketball teams, in many certain ways, constitute living and breathing organisms -- each is a unique collection of blood and muscles and brains all working towards a common goal, each with an expected lifespan of six months (the same period of time that your average worker ant lives for, by the way). Some of these teeming teams just aren't cut out for this world and cut out early, others are snuffed out before their respective times, and still others -- like, say, the third place-cum-NCAA participant 2006-07 Miami (Oh.) RedHawks -- get to live far beyond their expected span. But only one team gets to end its season with a meaningful victory, and live forever. (We're not counting the survivor in Myles Brand's Purgatorio -- er, the NIT.) For every other team, death comes swiftly. I have to apologize for the stark and gloomy terms, but I'm trying to illustrate why I prefer the wide-eyed hopefulness of Midnight Madness or the mundane rhythms of late January's conference games to college basketball's final month, why it takes me at least until June to be able to even look a basketball in the eye after the final mid-major is eliminated from the NCAA Tournament. For all the brief glimpses of overwhelming joy, for every One Shining Moment, there are a hundred final, tearful, bitter press conferences as losers' seasons are killed off in March's annual slaughter of the innocents. When you go to as many games as I do, it can seem like walking through a graveyard. 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. Epilogue With the notable exception of our friends in the Ivy League, very few choose to be mid-major people. |
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