March Sadness

One year, after Syracuse lost in the first round, I sat with my head in my hands, incredulous at what I'd just seen on the TV. I threw my hat across the room in disgust and proceeded to sulk for the next several hours. It led to a spirited argument with my girlfriend at the time. (It sounds like I used to be a real prince, eh?)

Another year, I took a three-hour lunch break (very unlike me) and gorged myself on bar snacks with a couple colleagues. I'm actually not sure I even went back to work that day.

March Madness is, perennially, one of my favorite times of year. I look forward to it, to dust off a well-worn cliche, like a kid looks forward to Christmas morning, consuming game after game, reading analysis after analysis, and feeling a special kinship with Joe Lunardi and his bracketology magic. Selection Sunday, and this isn't really an exaggeration, is basically a holy day for me.

This March, not so much.

In fact, between Thursday and Friday, the two most exciting days of the tournament (and maybe the entire calendar year), I watched exactly three minutes of action. And that's just because Bridget and I were out to dinner when the Kansas-UC Davis game happened to be on at a bar across the restaurant. This year, I hastily filled out a bracket a couple days before tipoff, closed my browser, and got on with my life.

Which leads to me a question: What the hell happened to me? 

Kids is the obvious answer. My attention, pretty much all of it, is elsewhere. Instead of watching conference tournaments, I was watching Doc McStuffins. Instead of Sunday afternoon hoops on CBS, I was swimming in what I can only imagine is an almost completely urine-filled pool with my now 1-year-old princess. Parenting ... it's fannnnntastic! (It is, really.) And that's probably part of the answer.

Another potential answer is that my interests have changed. It happens, right? Every morning, I open up my Timehop app on my phone and see what I was doing that day a year ago, two years ago, etc. But mostly and surprisingly, I've stayed focused on the same things. Sure, fads come and go, but things like podcasts, Bruce Springsteen, running, and college sports have been constants. This past week, no surprise, my Timehop was filled with status updates about brackets, images of mouth-watering adult beverages, and one word over and over: Cuuuuuuuuuse!

That leads me to the third potential answer to my bold question: Syracuse, my beloved Orange, didn't make the tournament this year. (The committee screwed 'em!) It's true that they are the one of the main reasons I follow college basketball, but, in reality, I love everything about the game. The passion of the players. The campus crowds. The rivalries. The iconic announcers. Together, it all warms my orange blood-filled heart.

So what then? Why don't I really care this year? I'm not positive, but my suspicion, though, to get a little emotional for a second, is that it's the first March Madness I've ever watched without talking to my childhood best friend first. More times than I can count, we filled out our brackets together, arguing about the strengths of the ACC vs. the Big East and trying to find this year's Cinderella story. We grew up playing basketball together and loved everything about the game -- playing it, watching it, dreaming about it ...

"It's getting a little dusty in here," as Marble liked to say, so I should probably stop. I just really hope I love the madness again next March. I'm pretty sure my friend would want want that.