Why I Love It

Well, obviously, my take on the Big Dance is likely to be much different than everybody else's. Any of you who know me at all could probably see that coming. I'm going to do my best to explain why it's so much fun to watch, and hope that I do it justice.

My church had put together a night of volleyball this evening. We try to do something sporting every Thursday night... this week we played volleyball. Indoors, obviously, so there were some elements we could have done without, like caroms off the ceiling, etc., but I digress. My team was made up of largely non-competitive spirits, excepting perhaps myself, but I wasn't really getting too concerned with my mistakes either.

We were all there just having fun - the other team was even more non-competitive than we were, goofing off, yelling at each other, just oftentimes flailing at the ball in such an un-athletic way as to insure their failure. Which is why, after about seven games, it was just becoming MADDENING to my team that we had lost six games in a row!!

One game we lost because the other team had one person serving about 20 points in a row!!! HE NEVER LOST HIS SERVE!!!

We didn't get extraordinarily upset, but we got more and more determined. We had to win a game. They kept asking us after every match if we wanted to change up the people on teams and we insisted NO. We had to win one. We were better than this. We could play better than this. Suddenly EVERYBODY on our team, no matter how free of a spirit, was united, determined, locked in, that THIS TIME, this ONE GAME, would be ours. It had to be. We would accept no other option.

Eventually we got it. It was sad how many tries it took us.

If this kind of grit and determination can be drummed up into souls that by and large could care less how many sporting events they won, imagine instead...

You've played basketball your entire life, and always been the cream of the crop among all your friends, all your family. You dominated in junior varsity, and you were the best player on your varsity high school team. You go to college on a scholarship, and suddenly you're not quite the best anymore. Everyone's pretty good at this level, every win is a workout.

There are 341 college basketball teams that are eligible to play each year in the NCAA basketball tournament. Only 65 are chosen. Only 1 wins. The odds that you'll see a basketball championship in your college career are staggeringly low, after having it all come so easily to you up until now. Just making it to the 65 is a chance, a tiny, tiny, ridiculously slim chance that this amazing thing could happen to you.

To be at the absolute height of your field, called the best of them all, better than the 5100 other basketball players at those other schools, and the countless MILLIONS who play at smaller schools or are still in high school, hoping for this chance.

So you made the tournament. Now you have to win six games in a row to reach that summit. You cannot lose even ONE. You must win. You have to win. You lose, you're finished. You know that you'll likely not even get back to this tournament again if you fail. Every basket you've shot in your 18-20 years of life has been for the sole purpose of winning This. One. Game. 40 minutes of basketball, leave absolutely nothing behind.

This is what makes the tournament so great. It doesn't matter who the teams are, it doesn't matter who you've got in your office pool brackets. Just watch the games. You're seeing kids who are literally playing the game of their lives. Even if they only score 2 points, they're playing their ass off. Because this One Game is everything they've been looking forward to since they first learned to play.

There's a commercial on TV right now that I absolutely love. In college basketball, a team is often spoke of as having pulled off a "Cinderella story" when they over-achieve or beat a team that the experts say they shouldn't be able to beat. This commercial just says simply, there are no cinderellas. Everyone who wins in this tournament, wins for a reason... because they have worked hard their entire lives to be able to do so.