Going to the Big Dance

    Since fourth grade, when I realized how much the basketball team could bring joy and delight to the community and the universe, the NCAA tournament in March, also known as March Madness and the Big Dance, was a pretty thrilling and tremendous part of the year. A format of spectacle to culminate the season of battles on the hardwood court. For me, this goes back to 1981, when I realized what I was missing in my own backyard. I came to understand that the Hoosiers of my nearby campus were a pretty big deal. It is now 2024. A lifetime has come and gone since elementary school.

    Like so many things in life, a great or euphoric event can occur, and we long for or expect to experience to repeat that awesome thing again. More than once, to re-create the magic. This has happened to me with a Boy Scout canoe trip as a teenager, to other vacation parties like a family reunion-type get together in the Outer Banks, North Carolina. I and you could probably think of a myriad of times, experiences, outcomes, people, results, that we loved once or more than once, and then to our chagrin does not happen again.

    Sports and following sports is replete with this phenomenon. If you follow teams or competitors and care, and derive pleasure from your folks winning, then the expectation for winning and celebrating victory is kind of like a drug, or a compulsion, or a dream coming true, or like being married to your dream person, or accomplishing something spectacular or extremely gratifying. On the contrary, coming up short and losing can be the opposite. Like, losing the election, or not sticking that new position or job, or having a relationship end suddenly or tragically, like death or heartbreaking rejection or simply the entropy of friendship waxing cold. Most of us can identify with loss. Sports and entertainment can seem light and trivial to many who do not care about these things, but to those invested it is a big deal. 

    Artists and movies, politics and economic trends or windfalls, which makes more sense to many because those outcomes are about money or real-world valuable commodities and livelihoods: all of these things that we invest our hopes and dreams in can affect our minds and souls. Trivial to many, like the stock market to a six-year old, or a military decision in a far-flung corner of the planet to someone in a safe quarter of a country and surroundings not under duress, or a rich person who cannot fathom what it is like to go to bed hungry, or live years without healthcare or insurance, or one who strives and struggles for weeks, months, and years to simply put bread on the table and pay rent. Some well off and pampered cannot imagine such an existence.

    For an invested sports fan, the team or the cause can be like a real-world girlfriend, lover, or investment scheme or work plan that can promise the world and ecstatic elation of its final goal: victory. Of course, all of us know that the chances can be slim to none that we achieve such success. Safe to say most competitors never get a chance to win it all, like the best of the best in the Olympics, or those who win the grand slams in golf or tennis, or dozens of other competitions.

    Alas.

    The Big Dance is a huge event where now 68 teams get invited, and within a month there is one remaining champ. It has happened to me-- my team has won it all-- and it took place when I was young. I was impressionable. Maybe too young, perhaps I got spoiled, or unrealistically set up to think that such a thing could occur again and again. At that point when my local Hoosiers won it all for the last time in my lifespan the team and the coach had been winning every five to six years, which is pretty amazing. Once when I was in kindergarten, again as a fourth grader when it hit home how I missed it, and then as a sophomore in high school. Indiana came very close when I was a beginner in college, after my church mission, and then again when I was in graduate school ten years later.

    Another ten years later magazines and critics picked my Hoosiers as the best team in the land. That was 2013, and I was living abroad, far from the confines of my Hoosier hometown, and quite distant from the borders of my home nation.

    The good ole U.S. of A. seemed much farther away once my hero Hoosiers were struck down in the Sweet Sixteen by Syracuse, me watching our final, sad, game of the season from a temporary barracks in Kabul, Afghanistan.

    The Big Dance had ended for me and the Hoosiers. The favored champs. But, we did win the Big Ten and we got in, and had a grand season.

    Other years are worse. We were not good enough, we tanked, we choked, we got run off the court. We did not qualify for the Big Dance at all. We fired our coach, we lost our recruits or returning players.

    This year, 2023-24, had some promise.

    But we think it is over as of yesterday, Saturday the 3rd of February. A month or more before the tourney. Another year not in the dance.

    Another year where the sports equivalent to Christmas and New Year's has been cancelled. 

    Sorry Indiana Hoosier fans: let's settle for President's Day again. No holidays, no dancing, no expectant presents and gifts and dinners and music for you. Enjoy the rest of the season, you chumps.

    Here is coal in your stocking, and like it. Get over it. Go cry in your sugar pops, you losers. (I realize the cereal is not called sugar pops anymore.)

    So, yeah, it is a bitter pill to swallow this early in February. It is more normal to have our hearts broken and our spirits decimated in March, when most of us should face the termination and symbolic death of our hopes and efforts.

    Death comes earlier than normal for Hoosiers fans.

    We miss you mom. We remember how excited you and your mate were that year we upset Duke and made it to the Final Four, moving past Oklahoma and falling to the triumphant Maryland Terrapins. My baby was a baby, and hopes were running high.

    We miss you so much. Mom is gone, almost ten years now, and the baby is grown and has a college degree.

    Life and love and hopes and dreams move on and transoform.

    Happy March Madness, all. It won't be as mad for me this year.

    Unless...