We're All a Little Mad in March

March 21, 2004: Sitting in my new apartment on a rare break from my fancy new job, I’ve never felt so alone. I’ve only moved 70 miles away from the town I love so very much, but the unfamiliar faces and brusque attitudes I encounter make it seem like 7,000; I blame that damned red bird, a symbol that all is not as it should be. On this cold Sunday afternoon, I attempt to recreate my grandmother’s fried chicken recipe. My team is playing some no-name school, Alabama somebody, of whom I’ve never heard. The chicken starts to scorch. I fiddle with the kitchen window to release the smoky smell. I return to watching the game. Somehow, this nobody school has surprised my beloved team. We’re beaten out before the Sweet Sixteen. The forlorn grey sky is suddenly peppered with huge, aimless snowflakes that wander through the open window into my little kitchen. I start to cry. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

March Madness means different things to different people. To office administrators across the nation, it means lost productivity and illegal use of the copier. To bored girlfriends and wives, it means the one month out of twelve in which date nights are positively out of the question. To casual sports fans, it’s a chance to cheer on an alma mater and match wits in the office bracket. It’s a slick marketing term, popularized by Brent Musburger, for college basketball tournaments, particularly the NCAA D-I Men’s tournament. But to diehard basketball fans, March Madness is far more than just a tournament; it’s an obsessive disease worthy of classification in the DSM-IV. We all go a little mad in March.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in a basketball family, or maybe it’s because I’m from the notoriously basketball-mad state of Kentucky. Whatever the reason, I find that so many of the most poignant memories of my life tend to revolve around March.

There’s March 1992, the game that makes every drop of Kentucky-blue blood run cold; Christian Laettner’s heartbreaking double play of chest-crushing and buzzer-beating in the Elite Eight that sealed Duke’s overtime victory. I can still hear my little brother, six years old at the time, furiously arguing that the ball didn’t leave Laettner’s hands until after the buzzer (a position he still maintains at 23…).

The following March, Kentucky’s appearance in the Final Four was far overshadowed by events in my own life. Early that month, my beloved grandfather, a retired basketball coach himself, passed away after a brief but devastating illness. A few weeks later, my beautiful cousin Hannah was born; as I grieved the loss of one of my personal heroes, I learned a profound lesson about the way life and love are replenished in our lives.

A few Marches later, in 1996, I was a college junior. After Kentucky’s National Championship win, only the second in my lifetime, I chose to remain in the dorm and put the finishing touches on my Political Theory paper rather than accompany my roommate and her boyfriend to the post-victory bedlam of downtown Lexington. At the time, I was more focused on Dean’s List and grad school applications than the Big Blue party around me; I will forever regret that decision. Two years later, I refused to miss the National Championship celebration a second time. I was going through a difficult time in my own life, unhappy with my graduate studies and concerned for an ailing relative. As my friends and I walked through the jubilant crowd, watching strangers exchange hugs and high-fives in celebration and comradery, I experienced a levity that assured me that, at least for this magical night, my own situation was going to work out for the best.

As a young professional in the early 2000s, I studied my workplaces’ attitudes toward office brackets in order to learn about my co-workers. I was amazed when my first workplace, staffed with women from Northern states, didn’t observe the March holidays. I later moved on to larger offices and more traditional observances, and even learned to tastefully acknowledge co-workers’ and clients’ allegiance to teams that opposed my own.

In recent years, as I’ve moved farther and farther away from home, March Madness has come to symbolize a time for reconnecting with old friends; my family and friends, as well as the people with whom I’ve worked and matriculated, discuss our brackets electronically as we watch the games. We Facebook every foul, Twitter every free throw, and text at every time out. It’s a time for remembering the collective great Marches of our past, cheering on the teams in the present, and anticipating the next great March.

It’s a great time to be mad.