It is just possible that I have finally escaped March Madness. Just some short musing here without much real point. Mostly just taking a break from un-packing.
Every year, I would grin and nod along while my fellow co-workers and peers nattered along about whether Syracuse had a shot if West Virginia beat Kentucky now that Kansas had upset Lousiville (uh huh…). Although only if Tennessee could get past South Dakota which you gotta admit’s been an incredible run (oooh! yeah!). And don’t forget San Diego State… (mmm. yeah). Nod nod nod ummmm…
Unless you kept up your own mental “bracket” to provide context, it would (and did) sound like some sort of weird 7th grade Geography quiz gone very wrong.
Or the “manly” conversation opener (usually delivered by an institutional salesman a good 6 inches taller than me and infinitely more athletic) – “Wow! Wasn’t that a great game last night?” To which I was expected to have some sort of secret code reply affirming my own manliness. Never really felt like I got that whole interchange down over the years.
Except for a short stretch in 8th grade, I have just never gotten anything out of basketball. I understand there is a tremendous sport in there for some people. But it just looks like a lot of tall guys running back and forth. And back and forth and so on – ad infinitum ad nauseum and somehow ad hoc.
I actually had a lot of company in the Wall Street “grit your teeth and get through March it will soon be over” club. Most of the women I worked with never cared much. And a lot of the guys were too busy working and worrying about other things to really pay that much attention. You also got a sense that a lot of the (mostly) guys rolling the banter along weren’t really that engaged either – especially as they got older.
But a super-engaged minority was always able to drive the water cooler chat into tedious banter around various state, city, and college names. One could say the same thing about a whole lot of conversational fodder. The Oscars. The Olympics. Election campaigns. But somehow March Madness always stood out for me as a particularly prolonged and pointless waste of time and brain cycles.
It is a tremendous relief to have trekked far enough away to hear nothing more than the occasional murmur; If Utah can beat Carolina then Duke will definitely win over NC State which clears the way for GW to get into the final four unless they get upset by FLorida which won’t happen because they will never get past Vanderbilt. Unless Michigan can upset Ohio in which case you really have to look at Washington or Wisconsin. But of course Notre Dame could be a problem for St Johns especially with Oklahoma out. And… (fade to black)
