And then there were four.
To be perfectly frank, I’m not the biggest college basketball fan out there. I got to Emory University, which isn’t an NCAA Division I school to begin with and doesn’t have the most dominant basketball team even at the Division III level (none of which I am complaining extensively about).
What’s more, my hometown teams don’t necessarily have the track record of some of college basketball’s powerhouses. While both the UW-Madison Badgers and Marquette Golden Eagles have historically produced solid competition in the tournament, they only have seven Final Four appearances between them, four championship game appearances, and two championship wins in the modern era.
What’s more, both teams failed to make the tournament this year. The Badgers (a Sweet Sixteen team last year) foundered especially hard, finishing with a 15-18 record and missing the NCAA Division I Tournament for the first time in 19 years.
So long story short, not the biggest fan.
That being said, I’ve become an intensively interested fan of the tournament, this year in particular, for a number of reasons.
Part of it is I have a bracket actually worth something.
No, I didn’t correctly pick the #16 UMBC vs. #1 Virginia upset. And no, I didn’t have the lower seeds of #9 Kansas State, #9 Florida State, and #11 Loyola-Chicago making it half as far as they did.
I did have #1 Villanova as my champion though, and man, am I clinging to that baby for dear life.
Anyone who has done bracket competitions with me before will tell you I normally have the propensity to overestimate the talent of the lower seeds and overestimate the standing of the upper ones. And while this year that logic might have served me decently, Villanova’s still in the dance and I still have a selfish reason to cheer them on.
Unselfishly, Loyola’s run has been nothing short of miraculous. The unexpected underdog from the Missouri Valley Conference has captured the nation’s attention with its stunning upsets over #6 Miami, #3 Tennessee, #7 Nevada, and #9 Kansas State, particularly with action in the first three games which the Ramblers won by a combined four points.
Talk about buzzer beaters.
And that’s not to say anything of the now notorious Sister Jean. Sister Jean Dolores-Schmidt, the 98-year-old nun who is the team chaplain for Loyola-Chicago, has longtime been one of the biggest supporters of the team, and has transformed into something of a celebrity in her own right for her curious conflux of age and occupation.
Loyola becomes just the fourth 11-seed to make it to the Final Four, and if they keep playing with the same tenacity they have had up to this point, they’ve got a better chance than most of beating #3 Michigan and advancing to the title game.
As disappointed as I was when I heard the Badgers and Golden Eagles were out of it, the presence of both Villanova and Loyola-Chicago has made this tournament in particular a real treat. I can’t say definitively which I would prefer to win. If Villanova takes home the trophy, I win my bracket pool and secure a pretty sick set of bragging rights (for the next year at least). If Loyola-Chicago wins…well as a friend of mine said earlier this morning: “if Loyola wins, I think we all win”.
A Villanova vs. Loyola championship game might be too much to ask for, but it would be one I would welcome warmly, for my own personal investments as well as for the David vs. Goliath narrative it would amply provide.
Will we be party to such a bout? I can’t say for certain. The only thing I do know: this last bit of March is bound to be mad.
