March Madness first became a thing in college. Not just because it was a big thing everywhere, but because college basketball became a thing for me -the undergrad team was the defending NAIA champion when I arrived, and by the time I joined the pep band my sophomore year they were back in the NAIA tournament, that famed 32-team small-school championship in Kansas City. So I spent two spring breaks in service there, lining up with the other kids in the lobby for a $40 cash per diem, and believe me when I say that if you had $40 cash per diem in 1992 you were a bigger baller than Puff Daddy. (My section lead turned a profit on the trip, but that’s another tale for another time.)
The point is, I was exposed to all the basketball, not just the Big Dance. There was the NIT on weeknights between tournament weekends. There was the first tournament with the new-look SEC, with ten thousand Arkansas RVs with Bill Clinton signs descending on Birmingham. I left my ushering duties early and missed seeing Dale Brown run onto the floor to “defend” Shaquille O’Neal from the Vols, went home and saw live games taking place twenty miles away where I’d just been. And I first realized that the weekend of the conference tournaments was as tumultuous and exciting a weekend as anything that happened the first two days of the actual field-of-64 Big Dance.
This was a new experience for me all around. It reminded me of the Olympics: all-consuming for a couple of weeks, everyone talking about it, places and names you’d never heard before becoming overnight sensations. And in the tournament itself, only CBS had the coverage, having paid a billion dollars for exclusivity – so you never turned the channel and just hoped they would whip around. And they did, in the main; there was barely time to celebrate a shocking upset or a thrilling buzzer-beater because no sooner did the clock hit zero than you were off to the next, one long three-or-four-day roller coaster ride. It set the stage for every spring since.
Because it’s honestly more fun when I don’t have a dog in the hunt. When it’s just 64 random teams – some national powers, some utter Cinderellas, some programs making the leap from just-happy-to-be-here to we-belong-here to oh-was-that-YOUR-Final-Four-berth? Bill Self at Tulsa, Jim Larranaga at George Mason, Gonzaga when they were “who?”, Florida Gulf Coast University as “Dunk City” and Harold “The Show” Arceneaux at Weber State and Bryce Drew of Valpariaso still making Ole Miss fans angry decades later. It’s a magical time. And it is one of the few things that reflects back from the era of the early 90s before everyone knew about the 12-5 upset and when there were a hard 64 seats on the starship, no exceptions. There are not a lot of things from my college years that still carry on; this might be the best one.