Madless

The biggest drawback of my "whirlwind" trip to the City of Angels is that it prevented me from seeing all but a few minutes of the NCAA tournament games Thursday and Friday. I saw more today, but still didn't manage to see the second half of the game I cared about. But maybe my neglect has had a positive effect, because my bracket is in better shape than many. And UCLA is in the Final Four!

Was I Vicar in a Former Life?

I can't believe how many great games I missed over the past four days. George Mason's astonishing upset of Connecticut today was the high point of a Himalayan week of college hoops. The funny thing is that I'm sort of enjoying this read-about-it-later mode. It reminds me of my year in Germany -- 1986-1987, if you're counting -- when I slipped downstairs in the middle of the night to make an international call to George Michael's Sports Machine -- 202-362-4444 -- to find out the outcome of the semifinal between Syracuse and Rick Pitino's trey-happy Providence Friars and, two days later, lay in bed at 4am listening to Armed Forces Radio as Keith Smart broke my father's heart. There's something wonderful about checking the results on my mobile phone. Not to mention that "watching" a game on the phone by pressing "Refresh" over and over, as I did during the second half of yesterday's UCLA-Memphis contest, is pretty darned exciting. Please note that I'm not bemoaning the presence of two SEC teams in the Final Four, because I can approve of an underdog even from that hated conference. Nevertheless, I'm pulling for the Bruins.