March madness meets sadness

The NCAA D-I basketball tournament is my favorite sporting event of the year. Don’t get me wrong, I can spend hours watching tennis matches on the clay of the French Open at Roland Garros stadium or the grass of Center Court in Wimbledon. I love bowl season, especially if the Badgers are playing in a bowl game, and then there’s the Super Bowl. But for me, the best time of the year for a sports fan is March. Not only is the weather getting warmer, but the nets are practically scorching from all the baskets and slam dunks.

Each year some team comes out from seemingly nowhere, and punches their ticket to the Sweet Sixteen or Elite Eight or even the Final Four. Over the years, I have seen George Mason, Loyal of Chicago and other underdogs take on the mantle of a “Cinderella Story” and make a deep run, upsetting a team laden with future NBA stars.

That’s part of the appeal of March Madness. It can be, well, insane. A player can catch fire and knock off a highly touted program. That’s certainly been the case this year. In fact, I can’t seem to recall a year in which I have seen so many upsets in the first week of the tournament.

Oral Roberts, a 15th seed, advanced to the Sweet Sixteen this year. They knocked off the second seeded Ohio State Buckeyes. Not that I’m all that disappointed. Over the years I’ve been forced to watch the Buckeyes top the Badgers in heart-breaking fashion, so it was nice to see “the” Ohio State University suffer a shock loss.

An even bigger loss came soon after, with number one seed Illinois being dismantled by Loyola of Chicago, who seems intent on making another Cinderella run at the Final Four.

It’s always fun to see David knock out Goliath, and I always find myself cheering on the underdog. It reminds me that stats, stars and numbers don’t matter when the game starts. All that matters is who can execute and make the plays when they need them.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t experience some amount of frustration and heart attack when an underdog wins. Each year I make out a bracket, and each year it goes down in flames in spectacular fashion. This year my bracket got busted in record time, and the Big Ten Conference, after being so highly touted all season long, only has one team in the Sweet Sixteen, and that’s just barely.

I also got my heart twisted and broken by Baylor this year. My Badgers were able to dismantle the UNC Tarheels by over 20 points, which surprised me given how up and down they have played these past two months. But they got the job done, only to be shell-shocked by Baylor, a team that can probably win it all.

That’s the other lesson I take from March Madness. Only one team gets to be crowned champions, and while the other teams will be suffer defeat, in their own way, they’ve won too. They’ve learned to overcome challenges and set goals and can go forth in life knowing that through hard work anything is possible.

M USINGS AND G RUMBLINGS

ROSS PATTERMANN REPORTER