This month, 68 Div. I basketball teams will enter a single elimination tournament. Sixty-seven of these teams' seasons will end in a loss. Sixty-seven separate times, senior students that have dedicated an incomprehensible amount of their life to the sport will weep when the clock hits zero. Just one team will exit “March Madness” victorious. However, this tournament isn’t really about which team is left standing at the very end.
The tournament is not a bastion for amateur integrity and fairness. The essential appeal and popularity of the tournament is that it lends itself quite perfectly to uneducated gambling; the American who has not submitted a bracket at least once has been deprived of the unique, unearned pleasure of rooting with desperation for 12 new young men dozens of times in a single weekend. Additionally, one game samples are fundamentally cruel, and only the most naïve among us would pronounce the eventual victor the undisputed “best” team.
The tournament is full of players you’ve never heard of living out their childhood dreams on national television. The tournament is George Mason making an impulsive and thrilling Final Four run. The tournament is Davidson’s un-recruited and undersized Stephen Curry entering the national consciousness for the first time. The tournament is two kids from Florida Gulf Coast University connecting on an irresponsible alley-oop that I remember vividly years later. None of these schools won the championship.
Bored one day last March, I decided to watch a game in the round of 64 between No. 3 seed Baylor University and No. 14 seed Georgia State University (GSU). I gravitated towards GSU quickly; they were both the enormous underdog and the better story. Less than a week earlier, Georgia State’s coach Ron Hunter had torn his Achilles while celebrating a win that catapulted GSU into the very game I was now watching. During timeouts, coach Hunter assembled the team around his improvised scooter because he could not stand.
GSU kept the game close until it began to slip away late in the second half. With 2:39 left in the game, GSU trailed Baylor 56-44. Baylor wouldn’t score again. Possession after possession, GSU stole the ball. When they didn’t steal it, Baylor missed every shot. Shouting for a team I had no relation to, I cheered as a Baylor player missed a free throw that could have sealed the game. I watched GSU bring the ball up the court, down by two points. I heard the frustration in the announcer’s plea, “what are they doing?”, as GSU seemed in no hurry to shoot the basketball. I watched as R.J. Hunter, GSU’s star player and impossibly also the son of the wounded coach, shoot a three from a distance that would make Steph Curry blush. The ball went in. The proud father and delirious coach fell out of his makeshift chair. I leapt out of mine.
The coach's son had hit the game-winning shot in the biggest game of either of their lives. GSU lost their next game. It didn’t matter.
March Madness
