And this is why I didn’t fill out a bracket…

Killer of Giants, Matt Howard

Your girlfriend is crushing you. She’s blonde. You don’t feel like a man. You haven’t felt like a man for two rounds. You can’t sleep. A single sheet of paper lays waste to your pocketbook. Unless that single sheet is five. Which it is. Because you have no self-control and even less conviction. Guys named ‘Veal’ reach into your chest and rip out your heart. Guys named ‘Heyward’ wish they’d stayed in school. You STILL can’t find Morehead State on a map. You’re an embarrassment, with a sh*t-faced grin. This is brutal. This is awesome. This is tourney time.

A four. A three. An eight. An eleven.

You didn’t see this coming. I didn’t see this coming. Miss Cleo on her best day didn’t see this coming.

Almost six million people filled out NCAA Men’s Tournament brackets this year via ESPN.com’s annual Tournament Challenge. Of these, one – repeat, one – accurately predicted the Final Four, suggesting the nostradamian “JSPearlman” is either the only person in America with relatives at VCU, Kentucky, Connecticut, and Butler, or – more probably – just filled out his bracket drunk.

I understand what you’re going through right now: pain. elation. confusion. clarity. I’ve been there – at the beck and call of destiny, hoping against hope that this five-foot-nine white guy from East Nowhere isn’t sending my champion packing in the early afternoon of day one.

I’ve learned my lesson: filling out the bracket is a fool’s errand – because only fools, or Einsteinian geniuses, succeed in this game of chance. You pick a horse in this race, it inevitably breaks a leg the first quarter mile.

College basketball reminded of its post-season perfection this weekend. It reminded that, try as they might, the forces that conspire to upend this thing of cosmically-ordained purity are helpless against March’s madness.

Sixty-eight teams? Bring it. Multiple networks. Bring it. ESPN’s panel of expertly irrelevance? The Tourney can take you, too, Digger.

Tweaks, tinkers, bursting bubbles and all, the tournament emerged, as it always does, a fully-formed exercise in competitive transcendence, wherein the playing field was laid even by baby-faced newcomers, giant slayers, little-engines-that-could, and the seemingly spectral sway of Gus Johnson, who, to no one’s surprise, presided over another OT thriller as a Pentecostal preacher might a congregational awakening.

Friday night pitted “chalk,” to use a word of little meaning, against paragons of parity. Probability gave us Carolina and Connecticut and Kansas and Florida – superpowers dead set on maintaining the pecking order.

Shaka Can! had other ideas. As did Brad Stevens, the 34-going-on-12 wunderkind bound for back-to-back Final Fours. Butler is in Indianapolis. Now you know.

Even things that should happen didn’t happen as they should. Kentucky heads to its 14th Final Four as a Draft-depleted four seed. The tournament’s highest ranked team hails from the mercilessly derided Big East. Virginia Commonwealth has won enough consecutive games to put any other 11-seed in history into the championship.

Kentucky’s Harrellson trumped Carolina’s Harrison. Of course.

In the end, there’s Cindi – Butler, VCU, defied logic. Girl’s gonna cram her fat foot into the slipper whether it fits or not. She’s gonna turn the tables on any number of declarative gasbags. Sorry, Gregg Doyel. Sorry, Jay Bilas. Sorry, Joe Lunardi. Your common sense is no good here. Your analysis is futile. Your brackets are burning.

- Robbie