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.