The Madness that is March

Welcome to My Favorite Month of the Year - March, the month of upsets and bracket busters, victories and defeats, cinderella teams and one champion. It is simply the month in which the NCAA holds its College Basketball Tournaments. Both men and women of the hardwood vie for a place in basketball history.Being reared in Indiana - home of the Indiana Hoosiers and the film "Hoosiers" - basketball is the winter religion that raised me. Never mind that every Sunday morning we would all get dressed up and go to Friends Meeting as a family, the real time to pray or center down as Friends say was every Friday night before the Pike High School Red Devils took on a notorious rival like the Carmel Greyhounds.

Once upon a time in the state of Indiana, before some meddling busybodies decided to divide the state’s schools into Divisions (A, AA, AAA and even 4A), it was possible for a small, rural school like Hickory in the famed movie “Hoosiers” to win THE State Tournament – there was only one State Tournament and only one champion. And although the NCAA does recognize Division II along with Division I schools, only Division I schools play in THE March Madness tournament. The tournament does by its very nature reflect schools of all sizes, from all conferences, and from every corner of the country. All the teams compete in one single-elimination tournament every March to determine THE National Collegiate Basketball Champion.The field of 65 teams is culled from a combination of the 31 conference champions and 34 at-large bids – true to form, again this year, the Selection Committee favored major conferences (ACC, SEC, Big Ten, and PAC-10) over the smaller, mid-major schools, a perennial complaint.

It’s Sunday (Palm Sunday to be specific), and I’m home watching basketball. I am not in front of Inhofe's office, protesting another year of this god awful war. I feel a little bit bad that I didn’t make it to the protest rally, but I’ve had a productive, if relaxing, day here at the house. God, I wish that Bush and Cheney would be impeached. That would be better than winning either pool I’m in. It would be the perfect cap to March Madness.

Follow along with the Indiana Hoosiers, here.