Selections have been made for this year’s NCAA Basketball Tournament and brackets filled. Regular season preliminaries are over, conference titles have been settled, tournament winners determined. Now things get serious.
There’s some teeth gnashing: “Why didn’t my team get in, while those guys did?” “Why are we a No. 5 seed, and not a No. 3?” But most of all, fanatics get to revel in more extreme emotional highs and lows than at any other time of the year. It's madness - March Madness!
Ohio State fans like me have already received a taste of that – Evan Turner’s 37-foot, three-point buzzer-beater depriving rival Michigan fans of the ecstasy of triumph on Friday; then the Buckeyes surviving double-overtime against Illinois on Saturday to advance to the Big Ten Conference Tournament final. OSU’s second half romp over Minnesota on Sunday for the championship was almost anti-climactic after the earlier frenetic finishes.
Starting this weekend, college basketball addicts from coast to coast will experience firsthand the fickle nature of happiness. Underdog teams will go on quick scoring spurts, filling their loyal followers with glee, until the stronger opponents regroup and take control.
A few teams will play over their heads and win a game or two they shouldn’t have, bringing happiness to the faithful, until they swallow a dose of reality and fall by the wayside.
Happiness, they say, is dependent upon happenings; when good things happen, we’re glad, but when bad things happen, we’re sad. So over the next three weekends we’ll witness a natural ebb and flow of happiness and hysteria, of hilarity and hopelessness.
Ultimately, only one team will grasp ultimate NCAA happiness, but all can experience the joy of knowing they did their best – even if it wasn’t quite enough. “Weeping may last for a night, but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5).
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