Lincicome: Fans, get your brackets and exclamation marks ready!!!

OK, bracketeers, laptop open, printer cartridge full and prop bets poised. WOW! March Madness! Coach Bernie picks HIS Final Fours!

The Road to Indianapolis!! The Flight to Phoenix!!!

(This column may be used for gambling and for arguing. Conclusions reached are the property of whomever needs yet another opinion about the NCAA basketball tournaments, men’s and women’s.)

*Though all judgments herein have been formed before either the men’s or women’s fields have been selected and seeded by the good burghers of the NCAA, I have been doing this long enough to know how it works.*

(Also, excuse the excessive punctuation, parentheses, ellipses, asterisks, capitalization, exclamation marks and brackets [after all, brackets are as essential to March Madness as are Duke and Gonzaga]).

Women have not escaped The Madness, interest growing and peaking with the widely admired Caitlin Clark, who never won a national title but is otherwise mile one on the journey to national notice.

The general sorting out of the women’s teams follows the same format as the men’s, usually with Connecticut or South Carolina prevailing, one of which shall again with Texas and UCLA challenging.

Oops, I tipped one of my Final Fours. I shall get to the men anon.

Where was I? Oh, yes. College Hoops! Selection Sunday! The Sweep Stakes 68! Bigger than 64! Bigger than all indoors! The First Four. The Final Four.

The Big Dance, Hoops Heaven, the Sheet of Integrity, the Full Metal Bracket, the High Temple of Roundball, Buzzer Beaters and One and Done.

It is a strange world, this place of schlock and slogans and, as it did for Alice in Wonderland, it only gets curiouser and curiouser.

Maybe next is Mega March Madness, or beyond that will be 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. The occasional Loyolas or George Masons have their memories while Florida and Duke have the titles.

Five schools have each won 100 or more tournament games — in order, Kentucky, North Carolina, Duke, UCLA and Kansas. Connecticut has been chalk for the women, winning a record 12 titles.

College football does not have anything similar, not in this concentrated design, arranged for convenient wagering and time slotted for basic cable.

College basketball piles up at the end, a convenience for gamblers and those who have not been paying attention [which is nearly everyone — more brackets and a couple dashes — this madness is contagious].

The haves like to encourage the have-nots and always say nice things about them later. It is a conspiracy of arrogance.

The First Four label is particularly misleading, a collection of the WORST teams that were neither automatic qualifiers nor thought enough of to be among other at-large selections.

So these poor saps are happily sent off to Dayton (a punishment all its own), where they sort out two of the four, who then proceed to lose to North Carolina.

Cinderella is a designation for men when more appropriately it might be applied to women, but seldom does Cinderella of either gender get beyond the Elite Eight (among which, trust me, we shall find the Final Four), along with others who can shoot the . . .

. . .Three-pointer! The trey. The great equalizer. Makes everybody 7 feet tall. Exploited by coaches. Loved by the last team to win with one. Especially on . . .

. . . The Tube! Network and Cable, every moment of every bit of Madness in March will be televised by somebody, often at the same time. And which leads us to, as promised, The Final Four!

Here they are, the Quality Quartet!, the Super Survivors!, the Favored Finishers! They will be [dot, dot, dot] Duke, Michigan, Florida, Arizona.

[I am glad I could clear this up.]