The Allure of March Madness

It's the most wonderful time of the year.

March Madness is ubiquitous. Your favorite website is certainly running a bracket right now, pitting everything from beers to rock bands against each other in an easily digestible, engagement-driven format.

There is a certain magic inherent to March if you grew up in a community built around a college town like I did. There are dozens of small cities like Syracuse scattered around America — places like Lawrence, Lexington, Storrs, and East Lansing — where college hoops is king. Kids grow up dreaming of being Melo, Embiid, Wall, Kemba, or Draymond. College football, often as a result of the climate and pitiful performances, is relegated to a second-tier status that will never be understood in cities like Austin and Tuscaloosa.

I lived about 15 minutes outside of Syracuse in one of the city’s many sprawling suburbs. Few, if any, of my teachers graduated from Syracuse University. Enrollment at SU among seniors was often a distant third to the local community college and whichever SUNY (New York state universities) was hot that year. 

Nevertheless, every March, without fail, academic life essentially ground to a halt if Syracuse played a day game during its conference tournament, and paused again a week later if the Orange were scheduled during the day for the first round of the bracket. One could easily gauge the coolness of a Fayetteville-Manlius teacher by how accepting they were of their students watching a Cuse game; the teachers with the most student street cred used their teacher login to override the web filter on the CBS Sports website and played the Syracuse game live for their class.

Despite the incredibly lenient attitude Central New York faculty take toward distracted students for a week in March, my passion for the event led me to push the envelope on more than one occasion.

When I was in eighth grade, before smartphones were commonplace, ESPN offered a score texts feature. Through your ESPN account, users could enable SMS updates for any game they favorited. For the first Thursday of March Madness, I set all 16 first-round games as favorites, ensuring I would receive halftime and final scores texted directly to my Pantech Crux throughout the day.

March in eighth grade at Eagle Hill Middle School is also poetry month, for which I was decidedly less enthused. The English department reserved the entire library for two weeks and sent all eighth graders for quiet, supervised poetry composition during their English period. A strict “no phones” policy was in place.

Some of my classmates had early model iPhones, but no one dared openly check their sports apps under the watchful eye of the English teachers and library staff. Owning a dumb phone, however, enabled me to evade initial teacher suspicion, and by making liberal use of the neighboring bathroom I was able to provide constant updates on the scores to my classmates. My English teacher caught on to the results being whispered through bookshelves and promised to confiscate the next iPhone he saw, but my Pantech and I made it to social studies unscathed.

Mr. Bersani, if you ever read this, I apologize. You were a great teacher, but Walt Whitman cannot hold a candle to the feeling of watching CJ McCollum lead tiny Lehigh past mighty Duke.