It ends so quickly. For all but one team, the NCAA Tournament each March is a cruel mixture of unrestrained joy and overwhelming sadness.
Basketball
There is no better drama this time of year than the NCAA Tournament, enough to warrant time on any big screen.
Finished products in the NBA Draft are like college basketball coaches who marry a Maxim swimsuit model, hold a percentage in a company that is sold for $100 million and lead a No. 15 seed into the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament.
It is March 24, and from mid-November until now, Mountain West basketball teams have played nearly 300 games. They have been ranked, defeated quality opponents, earned good enough results to have entered the NCAA Tournament with the nation’s No. 1 Ratings Percentage Index of all conferences.
I suppose there is a silver lining for UNLV basketball today, hidden somewhere in the mess of yet another opening-game loss in the NCAA Tournament.
If anything, the shove exposed the urgency that has attached itself to Mike Montgomery’s legacy. Perhaps it was for motivation’s sake, of driving his best player to greater heights. Perhaps it came from that cavernous place that said the moment was big, the game was bigger, and not many of either are left in his coaching career.
The Mountain West stuck out its chest a little farther Sunday when five of its nine basketball teams were selected to the NCAA Tournament, but that’s already old news. What matters now is how each performs when the madness begins.
This is what happened at some point in a conference room Sunday that housed the NCAA Tournament selection committee in Indianapolis: UNLV was placed in the bracket as a No. 5 seed and Cal was placed opposite it as a No. 12, and a red flag appeared on the movie theater-size projection screen displaying the matchup.
I’m not so sure it’s this simple, but for all the weirdness of this college basketball season, it just might be: My esteemed colleague, fellow Review-Journal columnist Ron Kantowski, viewed Katin Reinhardt’s recent shooting slump in the most basic of terms.
The myth: A cat has nine lives because of the swiftness it exhibits to escape potentially perilous situations. I have no idea if losing to Washington State in basketball overrides such fortune.
Perhaps the folks at Guinness have a record on it. Might be worth checking.
It was another crazy day in a season full of them. College basketball has gone all Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” on us.
A boy, not yet 2 weeks old, is living in the Bay Area with his parents and sister. He was given the name Justin after a college basketball player his father met and became close to while writing a book.
