Before the NCAA men’s basketball tournament started, our newsaper’s college basketball writer, Jeff Shelman, peered over the half-cubicle wall that separates us and asked for a prediction as to who would win it all. We thought for maybe three seconds and threw out an answer of “Florida.” A next-day newspaper story featured this brief exchange in exhaustive detail, culminating in the notion that Florida is not a very “hipster” pick. Shelman calls us “Hipster” quite often, probably a tip of the cap to our appreciation for music and a wardrobe seldom copied by other sportswriters (the latter described several years back during a drive across the Western U.S. as “Ragstock Across America” and also summed up by a confused writer in the Metrodome press box asking of another Star Tribune staffer, “Who’s the guy on your staff that looks like Beck?”). But we digress. We don’t really think of ourself as a “hipster.” No white belts, and we liked Pabst way before it was cool to like Pabst. And we certainly didn’t have any hipster sensibility in mind when choosing Florida; we simply had good basketball sense. Shelman, on the other hand, decided to ride Georgetown. Maybe that’s a hipster pick because they were a No. 2 seed? Maybe U2 is the most overrated band of the past 25 years? At least one of those things is true. In any event, we are still both right. And it would be fantastic if were still both right going into Monday night. So:

Florida 75, UCLA 67. The Gators can smell it now. They’re better than the Bruins and they know it. That’s a powerful weapon, friends.

Georgetown 63, Ohio State 60: For all the conventional, unhip reasons. The Hoyas can neutralize Oden; Ohio State’s youth tends to show up at bad times; and Jeff Green will rip out your heart, show it to you, perform a surgery to replace it, do the whole thing over again, then house a game-winning basket over your trembling fingers.

Then it gets interesting. We’ll save the title pick for another day, but rest assured: If it’s Fla v. G-Town, Shelman is going to wish he’d never asked.

Your thoughts, of course, are welcomed in the comments.

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