These next two days are about sneaking scoreboard peeks during staff meetings. They're about Wildcats and Tigers and Bruins (and Dick Enberg's "Oh, my!").
They're about watching a bunch of basketball games unfold just the way you scribbled it on a photocopied, 8-1/2x11 sheet of paper that doubles as a Powerball ticket for office bracket (and bragging) rights.
Welcome to the NCAA Tournament, the maddest March happening since Brutus shanked Caesar. The annual college basketball festival, perhaps this nation's best sports event, gets its ceremonial start Thursday, even with a game already in the books. (Niagara over FAMU 77-69 in what the NCAAs call the "opening-round game," if you need to update your bracket).
Finally, the overanalyzed issues of "Selection Sunday" -- Who's in? Who's out? Will Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim smile again? -- will slide to irrelevance, yielding the spotlight to those who most influence hoop-heads everywhere.
Start with Florida (29-5), the Midwest Regional's No. 1 seed, which sits six wins away from the first back-to-back NCAA championships since Duke in 1991 and '92 teams. UF rolled through the Southeastern Conference, winning its regular-season and tournament titles, and returns seven of the top eight players from last year's victories. Just don't tell the defending national champs what's at stake.
"People talk about the word 'defending,' and we've got to get out of that and understand it doesn't make a difference what happens the rest of our lives," Gators Coach Billy Donovan said. "In 2006, they're always the national champions."
Then there's the hunt for the next George Mason, the equivalent of searching the sky for another Halley's Comet. A No. 11 seed a year ago as an at-large team from the Colonial Athletic Association, the Patriots slew basketball Goliaths North Carolina, Michigan State and Connecticut to become the most unexpected Final Four entrant ever.
Now, players at Creighton, Long Beach State, Old Dominion and tiny Winthrop figure they can win their way to Atlanta, too.
"It would mean a lot to the program, that we're one of the top teams in America," Winthrop senior guard Torrell Martin told USA Today. "If we don't win, it's back to the drawing board."
Mason is absent this year, joining Louisiana State as 2006 Final Four teams whose seasons already are done. Of this year's 65 teams, only Texas A and M-Corpus Christi, which didn't field a basketball team until 1998, is making its first appearance.
The Islanders' tourney trek doesn't start until Friday against Wisconsin, but 32 teams -- half the field -- start today. No. 1 seeds North Carolina (East) and Ohio State (South) hope to start national championship runs. Their opponents, Eastern Kentucky and Central Connecticut State, search for a little history, too: Since the tournament grew to include at least 64 teams in 1985, No. 16 seeds are 0-88 against No. 1 seeds.
"We're decided underdogs, you might say," Central Connecticut Coach Howie Dickenman said Sunday night. "The feat hasn't been accomplished, and I'm not going to tell you that we'll be the first to do it."
Everything begins around 12:20 p.m., when Davidson and Maryland tip off in Buffalo and "lunch break" morphs into "afternoon off."
Intriguing matchups fill the day -- volatile Bob Knight and Texas Tech face Boston College early, and struggling Duke meets upstart Virginia Commonwealth at night. In between, Old Dominion faces No. 5 seed Butler and tries to extend the uncanny success for No. 12 seeds in the first round of the tournament; in 11 of the past 12 years, at least one No. 5 has won a game in the first round.
The day ends well past bedtime, maybe around 12:20 a.m., when the Gonzaga-Indiana duel wraps up in Sacramento, Calif. Forty-tight teams will remain at that point, giving the tourney a chance for a short siesta before games start again 12 hours later.
For folks stuck in staff meetings, the next batch can't come soon enough.
"Man, it's tournament time now," Florida forward Chris Richard said last week. "It's the best time of the year."
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