It’s March and I want to be excited and feel the Madness. However, I wrote about February Sadness (Post #421) but now I’m just March MAD. I love this time of year associated with basketball tournaments. This dates back to childhood and playing the Indiana High School basketball tournament in my basement with a bottomless Quaker Oats canister for a basket and a tin-foil ball.  I would set a timer for each quarter and run plays for each team, keeping score and moving the winners through the bracket. If the driveway was clear of snow, I would use a real ball and 10-foot-high basket to play the tournament game-by-game until I had a champion. It was hours of fantasizing about being in a team uniform after watching the Sectionals in the school gym, since basketball was rarely on TV at that time. I would listen to the games on our local radio station, where I eventually went to work. It was like a holiday when all the area teams would come to town and they would close the school as if it was a treasured “snow day.” That was long before “March Madness, when “Hoosier Hysteria” was king, and my very first tourney brackets were sponsored by the Peter Eckrich Company of Ft. Wayne, Indiana. They closed in 1972, just as I began to attend basketball games at Indiana University. 

When I was back in Indiana last week, the Sectionals were underway, except they do it in classes now by enrollment size, as opposed to the single-class tournament of my childhood where “David” often met “Goliath” on the hardwood. I couldn’t help but order the book, History of Our Hysteria: Indiana High School Basketball, as presented by the Indianapolis Star newspaper I was reading. It will be here soon and will hopefully pick up my spirits in what will likely be a disappointing round-ball March. It will be MAD rather than Madness for me this March, as my basketball is badly deflated. 

I watched last night as my Indiana Hoosiers blew a 16-point lead and lost to Rutgers in the BIG tournament. Rutgers finished last in the BIG conference regular season, but got the benefit of the home crowd in the misplaced MADison Square Gardens game.  Just before I ordered the “Hoosier Hysteria”book, I was reading an article about the “greedy, money-motivated,” expansion of the Big Ten Conference into Maryland and New York City, with most of the fan interest back in the Midwest, so attendance was suffering. I guess I’m bitter that Indiana drew the home town favorite, after a season of let-down after let-down. If the Hoosiers had won, they would have faced Purdue and have been eliminated anyways, but a victory might have earned them a consolation NIT invitation. Instead, I feel confident that the season is over. and it’s only the first day of March. This makes me MAD. I’ll probably be MAD next year too, until Coach Archie Miller puts a competitive team on the court and resumes our streak of NCAA tournament appearances that once stood at 18 under Bob Knight and Mike Davis.

The Wisconsin Badgers consecutive NCAA appearance streak ended last night at 19 with their loss to Michigan State, who will undoubtedly extend theirs to 21, even if they don’t win the BIG tournament. Outside of the BIG, Gonzaga will probably extend theirs to 20, Duke to 23, and Kansas to a record 29, while North Carolina (27) and Arizona (25) will make the field, but have missed a few years recently. Kentucky had a 17-year streak that ended in 2008 and UCLA’s 15-game run from 1967-1981, round out the top-10 tourney teams of all time. 

Yes, I will rebound from the disappointment of Indiana’s absence from the “Big Dance,” and continue to follow the high school tournament and Purdue throughout the month. I will also dutifully fill out my traditional NCAA bracket, and undoubtedly lose a few bucks to friends in the process. To make matters worse, I will out of the country for most of the NCAA tournament, but that is by choice. I will return to the states for the Final Four and the opening of baseball season with lots of great memories of Amsterdam, Venice, and Athens. So, it will be a very memorable March, and I will get over being MAD.