MY definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a bunch of pimply college kids to thrill me with their basketball results.
That's March Madness I'm talking about, and my definition also includes foods that are either brown, fried, or brown and fried. Also beer. Lots of beer.
Every March for as long as I can remember I've parked my comfiest chair 150 centimetres in front of my television on the opening Thursday of the NCAA March Madness tournament and sat there for much of the following 84 hours.
This year was different - I have an 18-month-old son so this is the first time I've ever had a tiny person walking around during my madness time, getting into mischief and trying to steal my pretzels.
Well, there was that time Prince came over and drank all my maple syrup, but that's a different story.
With a kid around I've had to make some lifestyle changes. I can't watch TV when he's around because the rapid-fire pictures could short-circuit his impressionable little brain. I can't have delicious salty snacks when he's around because he'll get into them and they could clog his impressionable little arteries. I can't drink too much beer when he's around because I could drop him on his impressionable little cranium.
So when madness time rolled around last week I, of course, took Thursday off, invited my brother over and kicked my wife and son out of the house. Dreaming of upsets, buzzer beaters and kettle chips smothered in beef stew, I kept a running diary of how the day went:
9: 12 a.m. No games yet so my kid and I squeeze in our own game of basketball or, as he calls it, "ba-de-bah." He can't dribble, shoot, or play defence, just "donk" and yell "Yay!" Maybe he can get a tryout with the Raptors.
9: 35 a.m. I'm hit with a slight pang of guilt as my wife bundles my son up and he gives me one last heart-melting "wuv uu" as they head out the door. The guilt soon fades as I turn on the TV and the first three things I notice are a player with a giant afro, a commercial for french fries and a commercial for the baconator. All good omens, I'd say.
9: 58 a.m. I'm starting to feel a little weird - it's just me in my pajamas on a Thursday morning, there are only two games on, I don't know anything about any of the four teams playing and I'm seriously contemplating flipping over to The Price is Right. Time for action: pretzels. By the end of the day I reckon I will have eaten 1,344 per cent of my recommended daily sodium.
10: 40 a.m. A new commercial shows a stuntman rigged to a harness flying headfirst into a giant rubber ball filled with Mountain Dew. Then things get really scary for the stuntman - they make him take a swig of Mountain Dew.
11: 23 a.m. First win of the day goes to Murray State. My father-in-law's name is Murray. If he ran a university it would be a very clean, slightly awkward place.
11: 45 a.m. Yay! My brother arrives with beer. Family law dictates we can't drink until the sun is over the yardarm. I don't know what a yardarm is and we're not on a boat, so . . . Cheers!
12: 25 p.m. These games are so dull, I decide to add some excitement by prepping my slow cooker beef stew and watching it heat up. Mmm, brown.
12: 40 p.m. My boy is home. Hide the beer! Run around! Yell! Energy! TV off - no worries, the games are lame so far anyway.
2: 30 p.m. Nap time for my boy and the tournament finally wakes up. My brother and I quietly scream as what would have been the biggest upset in tournament history - No.
16 North Carolina-Asheville against No. 1 Syracuse - is squashed by some very Goliath-friendly calls from the refs. Only the rich schools can win? What is this, college football?
3: 05 p.m. Nap ends, TV off. It's a good thing these games are terrible, otherwise my kid would be crib-locked for the afternoon.
4: 15 p.m. The sun is out? Hm, weird.
4: 45 p.m. Gonzaga is playing so: baby, you gotta go. The Zags and I go way back, long before North Van's Rob Sacré took his seven-feetof-funny comedy tour to the Spokane campus five years ago. I still have the rubber basketball from when I went to a camp there as a Grade 10 student in 1996. I feel like a music nerd who discovered a cool band before they became huge. "Oh, you like Gonzaga's new album? Well I got these bootleg practice films that were only recorded on Beta. So there."
5: 30 p.m. Argh, family returns, TV off again. Hit record on the DVR and hope I don't miss anything awesome. Delicious beef stew eases the pain.
7: 18 p.m. The young'un is off to bed so it's finally time to settle in and finish the day's madness. Gonzaga runs away with the win and the evening ends with no amazing feats except for my chair's impressive ability to stay intact despite my best attempts to gain 300 pounds in one day.
8: 05 p.m. As my wife and I quietly watch the last games of the day I'm filled with three things:
1) Carbs.
2) Anger that the one day I skipped work was a tournament dud. (I went back to work on Friday, a day that produced two of the biggest upsets in tournament history, including unknown Lehigh University defeating mighty Duke. As clever Internet man Dan Rubenstein tweeted: "I still feel bad for Duke fans, collars will be popped at half mast all weekend.")
3) The realization that while I will always love basketball, it will forevermore pale in comparison to ba-de-bah.
News sports editor Andy Prest writes monthly in this space.
aprest@nsnews.com
