Like so many things in life, March Madness would be much better if we could just enjoy it in peace. And, like many things in life, that ship sailed a long time ago. While the NCAA has long been about the grab for cash, not the purity of amateur athletics, each year at this time it seems like more and more entities are lining up with their palms out, hoping to snatch a little bit of the college basketball dollar. We blame the Internet. Sometimes we wish it would just go away, and the latest polls indicate there is a 60 percent chance of that happening. But we digress: If we have one goal this March, it is to not let Marketing Madness get us down. If we have two goals this March, it’s that one plus finding a place where we can get a shoeshine and a haircut while eating a sandwich — all three at the same time. But we’d really like to nail that first goal. Between dodging all this heart-attack snow (that apparently isn’t really coming after all), spending the next four days in St. Louis (NCAA wrestling coverage) and the final high school tournament of the season (boys’ basketball, starting March 26), we’re hoping to sail straight into the Final Four without being asked too many times to associate a particular car or sporting beverage with basketball via some inane play on words that took 10 people six months to create. We can only hope that you have the same luck. We’ll all need it if we are to enjoy these games together.

What else? First the Gophers men’s hockey team wins a huge and riveting series by using guts and heart; then the Gophers women’s hoops team gets an NCAA bid and the Wild gains a huge victory.

Get well, Tom Pohl.

Fasola-link! Curing your post-St. Patty’s Day blues.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 8:55 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.