While many of my neighbors here in the Upper Midwest are enjoying going jacketless in our unseasonably warm weather, I’m also enjoying the absence of something that’s usually around this time of year: my NCAA tourney bracket.
Let me begin by saying that I’m a college basketball fan. To call myself a “fanatic” would be a bit generous, but I’ve been filling out a bracket since I was about seventeen, and like many American sports fans, it’s one of my favorite events of the year.
So I’m definitely not trying to be a contrarian.
But this year, more through circumstance than choice, I didn’t end up filling out a bracket. It certainly felt a bit…different…But I didn’t feel that I was missing anything terribly important. I was still going to watch the tournament; I was still going to root for teams that I hadn’t heard of three weeks ago. I do have to say that I would miss the banter, the trash talk, and the fun of being in a tournament pool and acting as if my success or failure had to do with anything other than luck.
I guess I was pretty much ambivalent. I hadn’t gone bracketless before…but I was willing to give it a go.
Fast forward to today. The tournament is down to sixteen teams, and like every other year, there are some powerhouse teams and some underdogs. As for me, I have watched about as much basketball as I have every other year…only I’ve had about twice as much fun.
Going bracketless has been a revelation.
I know I’m flying in the face of so many people much smarter than me who would characterize bracketology as integral to enjoying the tournament, but I have not enjoyed March Madness this much in a long time…perhaps ever. My fan experience this year has not been about my own knowledge (or rather, dumb luck) in picking the “right” team more often than my friends. This year, it has been about the stories.
After all, why else do we watch sports? Or participate in it? It’s for the stories. In the past, the stories about March Madness for me have been about a great pick that I had made; about the big upset that I’d successfully predicted. This year, I’ve realized that the best stories from March Madness are about the young men on the court. With very few exceptions, they are ordinary kids. I don’t know the statistics, but I can say with some certainty that the overwhelming majority of the players on the court in any given tournament game will not play professionally. Most will go on to become doctors and lawyers and accountants….they will become, by our standards, ordinary.
But in March, the kid from the small school who’s got a double major in accounting and economics and who is literally playing in what might be his meaningful basketball game could, for a moment, play basketball as if he were something else entirely. His play could, for a moment, be the stuff not only of highlight reels, but of legend and of poetry.
Now, that’s a story.
Will I fill out my bracket next year? I don’t know…I certainly have no intentions of starting a “bracketless” movement. Maybe I’ll figure out how to love the Madness on two levels, as I imagine many people do. But I can say this…I’m glad this year that I watched basketball, and not just the tournament.
