March Madness

An Important Drop in the Bucket

All of my life I’ve been a sports fan — of a sort.

Primarily because I’m loyal. I enjoy watching sports. When I do watch, I’m enthusiastic and genuinely interested. But I don’t go out of my way to watch, not for my own sake anyway.

My interest in basketball is heavily influenced by brother, my husband, and now my sons. I genuinely enjoy watching the Timberwolves. I generally want to University of Minnesota teams to do well. But again, I’m not making a huge effort to watch the games.

Is it possible to be sport-bipolar? If so, that’s how I’d describe myself. From completely apathetic to rabid interest. I know no in-between.

No matter what sports mood I’m in, however, I will make it a point to be involved with Elliot and Quinn’s interest in it. Even March madness. Let me be real for a second, if they didn’t care about it, I wouldn’t either. If they didn’t remind me in March that there was more happening than St. Patrick’s Day, I would likely never think about it. But they do remind me, and they do care about it, so I care too.

They love filling out their brackets and following the team losses and successes. They enjoy analyzing how well our predicted teams will do, and then avidly track how amazingly or poorly our predictions hold up.

This gives me two and a half weeks in my year where I’m guaranteed to share in excitement and heartbreak, daily updates, and time together watching games with my boys. I don’t care if I like basketball or not, I’m taking as much of that special boding time as I can get.

Am I good at predictions and brackets?

…

I left space there for laughter, because the answer is a definitive no.

I have ranged anywhere from nearly winning it all (an incredibly rare occurrence), to being out in the first game because the team I predicted to win it all crashed and burned immediately (a more common occurrence). I don’t know at least half of the teams, and the ones I do know — I have no idea how their season is going.

Sometimes I fill out a bracket based solely off of how much I like the sound of a team’s name. I didn’t attend Duke and have never visited, but for some unclear reason, I often insist they’ll sweep. Maybe it’s my own special kind of OCD that insists I choose them again this year. I swear the year I finally go with someone else, Duke will take it all.

Yet I persist. Why? Have they even won since I’ve started doing brackets with the boys? No. Not once.

But I don’t care. I don’t care that my picks suck or that we usually laugh at how gangly and awkward my bracket is. I love it. I’m excited to fill the bracket out, to see who Matt and the boys choose, to listen to them making their case on why they picked or didn’t pick someone.

I don’t do any of this because I’m a diehard college basketball fan, I do it because I’m aware of how quickly time goes, and how these March Madness drops in the bucket may be small, but can change the color of everything in the bucket over time.

I’m sure I’ll lose, but either way March Madness is a win for me, because it’s time with Elliot and Quinn, sharing in their interests, their joy, and their excitement.