Basketball was my favorite sport as a kid. The NCAA Tournament was a tentpole event in my life. Every year, my friends and I used to skip school on Thursday and Friday just to watch the first two days of the NCAA Tournament. We’d all hunker down for hours on end in one of our basements, each of us having our printed out brackets with us to track our wins and losses, and we’d eat enough Dominos and McDonald’s to make a fucking billy goat puke. If it was nice outside, we’d play real basketball during some of the downtime between games. It was a tradition I will never forget. It was a tradition that I loved every minute of.
Nowadays, I don’t watch much basketball. At some point I fell hopelessly in love with golf and I pretty much abandoned all other sports. Sure, I catch a few games of the tourney and some of the NBA playoffs, but outside of that, I rarely watch it. This year, I didn’t watch a single college basketball game. But the NCAA Tournament is here and for some reason I still waste money joining numerous pools.
I did zero research before filling out my bracket. When you are this far removed from it, it’s better to pick using blind ignorance. I mostly just picked favorites to make it far, but I do have several upsets in the first round. And then there is Wichita State. Oh, sweet, sweet Wichita State. For some reason, I decided they will make it to the Elite Eight. They probably won’t even escape the first round, but if they do make it that far, you best be sure that I will boast about it like I’m some sort of goddamn genius. “You fucking clowns watch this shit all year and my bracket is in the top 95%. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
Anyway, here she is. The winning bracket.
