It’s still OK to enjoy the rest of March

I have very few problems with the bombardment of March Madness. I especially don’t mind it… I have very few problems with the bombardment of March Madness. I especially don’t mind it since I go to a school that made it so far. It’s like in high school when one of your sports teams makes it to the state competition – it’s awesome!

I could step back and say, yes, arguably, there are more important things about which to care and think. We all should care more about world hunger than who makes it to the Final Four, but I’m going to defend my right to talk about sports and like it.

I don’t mind that at every St. Patrick’s Day party I went to, half of the eyes in the room were attached like lasers to the TV screen. Maybe by that point everyone else in the room was in a very mellowed-out drunken stage and didn’t care very much about the score of the Indiana-UCLA game, but I was yelling more loudly than anyone that UCLA better not lose and screw up my bracket.

But March Madness seems to have taken over certain people’s lives.

The night Pitt first played, I was in the middle of a meeting. The meeting was going very smoothly, and we were all actually having a good time – a rarity for most meetings. But one person couldn’t stop looking at his watch, making me nervous. We all knew Pitt was playing. We were all trying to get out in time. But why did it have to be such a nerve-wracking experience? When we were wrapping up, someone asked what time it was, and we all laughed when the obsessed member said, “9:27,” without even glancing at his watch.

Sure. Obsessions like this can be funny. But how much is too much?

My grandpa couldn’t talk about anything else during our weekly phone call on Sunday. I tried to pretend I was following it as much as he was and told him I had been worried about the close match-up the night before, which was true. Then he asked me what the final score was in the game. Yes, I watched it. Yes, I cared about it. But it wasn’t the main thing I remembered from the night. I was lucky that I knew it was close. Did he honestly expect me to remember the exact score? I quickly changed the subject.

This isn’t the best example I could use, though, because that conversation was actually a lot more interesting than our typical Sunday afternoon conversations, which are normally a play-by-play of the bowling he’s watching on television. You think watching people bowl is boring? Trust me, it’s a heck of a lot more boring when you’re just having it described to you frame by frame over the telephone for a half hour. So really, I shouldn’t complain about one month of basketball recaps.

My friend had this problem, too. Her uncle called her last week, solely to talk about basketball. She answered the phone, and her uncle asked, “Did you see the game?” She replied, “Who is this?” He hadn’t even said hello.

Another girl I know had a friend call her from Chicago during one of Pitt’s games to talk about it. My friend didn’t even know the Pitt game was on television.

That’s OK. It’s OK to care. It’s OK not to care. It gives people who may otherwise be reduced to the small talk of their semesters to the small talk of their brackets.

It gives professors something to talk about in class other than the class, which no one really cares about. I know someone’s analytical chemistry professor who brags during every class that he’s first in his bracket.

We know the percentages of our brackets. We hang them on our walls. We crumple them up and throw them away when we get mad. Then the next night we pull them out of the trash, deciding to give it one more try with a desperate hope that everyone else will do just as poorly, if not worse.

And according to Time Magazine in the March 26 issue, people pay $2.5 billion each year betting on the NCAA Tournament. It’s cost businesses $1.2 billion in productivity costs. It’s in our lives whether we like it or not.

Pitt does have Rhodes scholars, and we’ve ranked seventh in the nation out as a top research universities. We have reasons other than basketball to be proud of our school. We also have a finalist for the sexiest co-ed in America, according to Spike TV.

But right now, it’s March. And it’s OK to be a part of the Madness.