Sports > March 27, 2008

By Martin Rickman | Staff writer

There are only a handful of events that I truly look forward to each year. That sounds depressing, but I mean, these are things that drive me from day to day, benchmarks that I just try to get to in the year. Some of these include the first day of college football season, Christmas, the first day with a full slate of games of baseball season, NFL draft day and Thanksgiving.

There’s one other day, however, that is the most important day of the year to me: the first day of the NCAA Basketball Tournament.

Ever since I was about five years old, I have plotted to get out of whatever I’m doing to make sure I can watch as much basketball as I can during that weekend.

My dad instilled that in me out of the womb, and I have followed his lead.

Some of my best memories are of tournament sites we attended: Arizona, Cleveland, St. Louis and even Winston-Salem last year.

I craved these trips; they got me out of class for a few days and allowed me to see future NBA players up close.

I remember talking to Rick Majerus in Cleveland’s games in 2001 better than I remember any of my birthdays.

The NCAA Tournament is not just a sporting event to me every year; it legitimately takes more importance to me for one month a year than anything else the rest of the year.

This is Thanksgiving dinner on a much higher scale for me – gluttony at its finest.

Instead of mashed potatoes and turkey though, I would binge on as much Rick Pitino, Bob Knight, Jim Boeheim, Roy Williams (of the Kansas variety) and Lute Olson as I could handle.

I would year-in and year-out look forward to rooting against Duke, the inevitable Bob Huggins second round choke-job at Cincinnati, Roy Williams’ inability to get to the Final Four, and of course, the Cinderellas.

Nothing made me happier than seeing the Hamptons, the Sienas and the Bucknells defy the odds and topple the giants.

Nothing made me more proud than to see the team I grew up rooting for, Valparaiso, stand their own against teams like Arizona and Michigan State in the tournament and behind Bryce Drew, make their way to the sweet 16 in their dream season of 1998.

There just has never been anything like NCAA Tournament and I don’t think any other postseason ever will be.

This is the only place where 64/65 teams all truly believe before the tournament starts that they have a legitimate chance at winning six games and becoming the NCAA Champion.

That’s why my eyes shine every time a team like Holy Cross goes out to that early 2-0 lead against a team like UNC and their fans roar with more passion than any fan of UCLA will at all during the tournament.

For that brief moment (before they get pummeled into the ground), those MEAC or Summit League teams of the world have a chance against the best team in the country.

Show me another sport where this could happen.

Show me another sport or postseason with moments like N.C. State’s miraculous cardiac run to the title, Villanova’s incredible upset over Georgetown, the Princeton backdoor play, a UNC freshman wearing #23 in 1982 leaving his mark long before he would become the best player ever and Indiana’s Keith Smart hitting a shot on the same floor Jordan did to give Indiana the 1987 championship.

These moments make college basketball the sport of stories, the sport of unforgettable moments that no other sport can give fans.

College athletes, a large minority of whom cannot even legally buy a drink at the bar, lead their teams and their fans into a whirling dervish of a postseason in which it is impossible to even leave the room to get a bag of chips without missing something incredible.

That’s why when I saw Western Kentucky topple Drake, Siena shock Vanderbilt and Belmont play their hearts out against Duke, I just shook my head and smiled.

This is March, where everything can happen and where even though nothing should surprise me anymore, moments happen every year to keep me guessing.

This is the only sport where a player like Stephen Curry can single-handedly dismantle an overrated, over-hyped Georgetown team and show that for one day, a kid who wasn’t recruited by big programs, who doesn’t have an elitist, expectant attitude that Big East teams often have, can do something that will be talked about for years, much like Drew’s shot 10 years ago and Smart’s shot two decades ago.

I love this tournament and I’m looking forward to finding a way out of work when I’m 40 to watch someone from a team like Mount St. Mary’s beat Texas and have a performance compared to that Stephen Curry kid 20 years ago.