Sooooooooo....Sunday night. I have had some bad Sunday nights in March. returning from Vegas after the first few days. Feeling broke. being broke. Brackets broke. Heart...broke. So I am reasonable comfortable with March Madness Desolation Effect (MMDE) though it has hit me pretty hard this year. MMDE is an insidious disease with no known cure. It manifests itself with depression and exhaustion and a general loss of a will to live. For many who play the KUBE Brackets, sadly these symptoms cannot be distinguished from your every day life but many (several) of the 400 plus KUBE players are reasonable high functioning, non-drooling, in school or have jobs and (arguably) productive members of society. For them seeing their brackets burn (and I just finally did actually burn mine) is devastating.
For me this year has been a very difficult one and today particularly cruel. The initial Mizzou loss was a disaster but it was cleaned up for me by Duke and Notre Dame losing coupled with a Billiken win. I thought I had something going perhaps with Vandy and the future while not being bright was at least not a the relentless, vast wasteland of turnovers, airballs and the steady, inexorable advance of the hated number 1 seeds. This situation not being bad enough it is exacerbated by the asinine, insufferable and unjustifiable Miller 64 commercials. I would rather watch Charlie Sheen hit 3 pointers all day long for Ohio State and I hate Charlie Sheen and hate Ohio State.
When I woke up this morning my 5 brackets (three wantonbeckers, a big boy and one for mom (Doris Mae though I misspelled her name) were merely a disaster. My average on those 5... wait for it...298! My wife was in at 217 and my daughter, though she picked Mizzou was at 10. But, I thought, perhaps today would be better....NOT! not a lot of upsets. I guess I am heartened for Ohio since they are not Ohio State. My Billiken loss was really crushing and to see Majerus rearing up was a little bit of a nightmare. Not sure how much more I can stand this evening.
My advice for you, my fellow KUBITES is to make sure you are not alone. Dring a few solid glasses of bourbon. Soak in a hot tub. If you have any weed you definitely need to smoke it. Grab Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged", use it to balance the wobbly table in the kitchen, and go to bed.
I will leave you with an excerpt from Bernie who quoted a teary Conklin (very hard to watch): "Coach has done so much," Conklin said. "Being his first recruiting class, he told me that we were going to help him build something special here. And it felt like this year it really came together. We were able to take what Coach taught us.
"He’s a great coach. I couldn’t imagine playing for a better coach, a better person. He doesn’t just teach you about basketball; it’s about life. And he’s a great figure for the community and for the city, and he’s really brought St. Louis basketball to where it is right now, bringing in great guys.
"We all love each other in that locker room. And he just knows how to read a person and he brings us all together and we buy into his system because it works, and it brought us this far this year. And you know they’ve got a great nucleus coming back next year and they’re going to be a really tough team."
Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/miklasz-billikens-make-majerus-proud/article_2fcf3fd2-715e-11e1-b339-001a4bcf6878.html#ixzz1pWTaPIlA
