Lincicome: It’s a mad, mad March and we’re stuck in it

Nothing deflates like a busted bracket and mine broke early. My team to win it all, Kansas, could not win even one game, losing immediately to a team named, in Ozark speak, Ar-Kansas, not to be confused with Yer-Kansas, and that’s that.

So, I am left with no one to root for. This is one of the flaws of March Madness, although a hint to disorder is right there in the name.

I had given some thought to a team named Lipscomb, familiar sounding and close enough for spell-check. Reluctant research found no logic to support my endorsement, yet a hunch would have been as good as a Kansas as it turns out.

Without anyone asking, March Madness, college basketball's frantic season, is here again, with convenient labels for those of us who have managed to avoid everything up until now.

This has not been an easy thing to do, since college basketball, like stomach flu, is everywhere and beyond relief.

We accept the language of the moment, pretending to understand the difference between First Four and Final Four, Big Dance, Hoops Heaven, the Sheet of Integrity, the Full Metal Bracket, the High Temple of Roundball, Shock and Ahhh, Buzzer Beaters and One and Done.

We have become accustomed to the NCAA selectors mixing the raisins with the bran so that someplace called Bryant has every bit as much right to be there as does Michigan State, or Liberty with Oregon, Grand Canyon with Maryland, even if you need a GPS to find them.

We take on faith that Mount St. Mary’s is not uphill from St. Mary’s and that McNeese is a State because it says it is, while Norfolk is not, no matter what it says.

Those of us dedicated enough to sort out BYU from VCU will find that, initially speaking, neither one is UCLA, though VCU made the Final 4 more than a decade ago causing temporary use of Cinderella instead of Commonwealth as its middle name.

So numb have we become that we pass off Gonzaga as a real place and not drink at Starbucks while we’re not convinced that Robert Morris is not a barista.

It is a strange world, this place of schlock and slogans and, as it did for Alice in Wonderland when the March Hare tried to stuff the dormouse into the teapot, it only gets curiouser and curiouser.

I can imagine Mega March Madness, or beyond that Mega Mammoth March Madness, until it ends somewhere, as it usually does, in April, which should be known as April At Last, to give April its own noise.

The NCAA basketball tournament is about dreams. And it is about lies. Madness is, after all, both a dream and a lie, figuratively and alliteratively.

The dreams override the lies and feed the notion that every team has the same chance when all every team has is the same shower soap.

In the end chalk almost always prevails, the top seeds there at the finish. Maybe the worst Final 4 ever was a couple years ago when Florida Atlantic (not to be confused with Florida Gulf of Mexico), San Diego State, Miami—all in their first finals--and at large Connecticut was the eventual winner mostly on pedigree.

March Madness has become an American fixture, attracting more wagering than the Super Bowl, causing more agony than the Academy Awards, stretching longer than the World Series and conflicting with new offerings on Netflix.

Demands to pay attention overtake indifference. Pressures to pick a bracket from among teams you had no idea even existed are everywhere, from on-line to outside, from friends to foes, from in-laws to outer space.

Yes, that’s right. All the way to Mars, courtesy of the world’s richest doofus, who has his own spaceship and several T-shirts. Anyone who could foretell a perfect bracket would get a ticket to the Red Planet, which I guess could also mean Ar-Kansas. I’ll have to check the small print.

And one-way or round-trip? Who knows? Doesn’t matter since no one on this planet has ever correctly picked the entire bracket from first four to final one.

Mars, as it has forever, will have to wait.