The Four Greatest Days In Sports

The NCAA Men’s basketball championship tournament is upon us, and as usual, everyone in the universe has something to say about it. Predictions abound. Sports pundits are in full-tilt form, assessing the teams, critiquing the seedings, weighing the regions and prognosticating with near-religious fervor. Their fortune-telling will, of course, be entirely forgotten once the actual games are played, but for now they keep us quite entertained.

And we mortals try to read the tea leaves, too. You’re in a pool, and so am I, and so is everyone you know. If you’re not, you should be. What do you have to lose? Ten bucks? And what is ten bucks to risk against the joy of nailing that 5-12 upset, choosing the first number one seed to fall, or picking seven of the final eight teams? Even if your bracket is a train wreck after day one, here’s the beauty of what that ten dollars does: it gets you involved in the year’s Four Greatest Days In Sports.

From Thursday to Sunday (rounds one and two) 48 games will be played. The television coverage will be gargantuan: nine hours a day of pure, mainlined, college basketball, in its simplest win-or-go-home format. The result is so intense, so concentrated, that it actually forms a bubble around the event, separating the good from the bad. The Four Greatest Days In Sports distill college athletics down to the beautiful and the true, and allow us to forget, for 96 hours, the things that shouldn’t be.

Here is what is pushed outside the bubble: Abysmal graduation rates. Academic scandals. The notion that athletics distract from the educational mission of a university. The inability of college football to choose a true champion. The dead-end debate about paying college players. Athletes leaving school early in hoards to chase NBA money. Illegal payments from boosters. John Chaney’s hot-tempered thuggery. Ohio State athletics.

And what’s left? Basketball. Just that. Ten kids on a court, playing their hearts out so that they can play some more. The grace of the game. The thrill that a 16 seed feels just being there. The passion of the coaches. The joy and heartbreak of the fans. Buzzer-beaters. The Cinderella college you’ve never heard of. Clutch free throws. Inside the bubble, college basketball is what is should be. Every game, every shot, every moment, it all matters. The bubble extends to the rest of the tournament, but these four days are the pure, untainted reason that sports were invented in the first place.

So even if you know nothing about college basketball, go join the madness. Fill out a bracket. Watch basketball all day Saturday. Get on somebody’s bandwagon. Get at least a little taste. I know, I know, it’s just basketball. But life inside the bubble is idealistic, graceful, and as cheesy as the “One Shining Moment” highlight video that CBS runs after the championship game. But it isn’t too much to ask that we suspend our cynicism for four days, or maybe the whole tournament.

Life is good inside the bubble, right Keith?