Photo by: Clarion
The Big Dance has certainly not failed anybody that has been glued to their chairs watching the first 60 games be played out.
Now that the nets are cut, and the field trimmed to just four, we can look ahead to the final three games and the final weekend.
The best part of the tournament may have passed us – I’m a first round and Sweet 16 fan – yet the conclusion is still rewarding for fans.
Whether it be UConn triumphing over heavily-favored Duke in the 1999 championship game, or even last year’s almost half-court miracle shot from Butler’s Gordon Hayward, the tournament always gives you one concluding memory in its final weekend.
We will always remember the madness of March; however, it is in April when the champion is crowned, and that’s what matter most.
The slaying of goliath’s (Duke, OSU, KU, I’m not sorry to see you go) always creates a riveting impulse within us to scream at our TV screen and leap in unexplainable hysteria, yet the joy we feel when the top dogs meet their end is incomparable to what it must feel like for the players still left dancing in April.
With the over-abundance of madness, we tend to overlook the Final Four and the national championship game, but they are the three most important games of the year, and are ultimately the ones that define the season.
The craziness and the excitement are inevitable – it’s what makes this time of the year the best in all of sports. But what’s really unpredictable and the ever-changing variable to equation, is who remains once the field is cut to four.
This year, we have a prime example of not knowing who the best teams are until the ball is tipped off and the games are played.
No. 8-seeded Butler out of the Southeast Region, No. 3-seeded UConn out of the West Region, No. 11-seeded Virginia Commonwealth out of the Southwest Region and No. 4-seeded Kentucky out of the East Regional are the four that will head to Houston this week to play in Saturday’s national semifinals.
All four teams dealt with adversity in their own way, yet they used March to overcome it and prove to themselves as well as to the entire nation that they are in fact amongst the nation’s elite.
Butler’s Hayward went ninth overall in last year’s draft, while Kentucky saw a record-high five players leave school all to be selected on the first round. UConn was the ninth best team in the Big East Conference, which was the same conference to earn the most bids in tournament history. Despite a rough regular season, UConn won nine games in nineteen days, another first. And then there is VCU, the tournament’s darling, and maybe its most precious Cinderella of all time. The Rams have won five games already, and if they somehow win two more and crown themselves as champions, then they will have won the most tournament games in a single season. Quite the accomplishment, I must say.
The postseason is almost over, but there’s one last weekend to amaze us, and that’s what April is all about – an extended period to revel in the amazing sport of college basketball.
