March Madness
April 8, 2008
I have spent considerable time over the last month watching the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, commonly known as “March Madness”. Every year, I take what amounts to a three-week hiatus from my normal routine to keep up the madness. This year’s tournament featured quite a few upsets early (six teams ranked #10 or higher advanced to the second round; #10 Davidson made it to the fourth), but more memorable was the fact that all four #1 seeds made it to the Final Four for the first time. My alma mater, the University of Oklahoma, fared no better or worse than expected: advancing to the second round but losing to Louisville.
The last two games of the tournament were absolutely thrilling.
- After Memphis easily beat UCLA in the first of semifinal games on Saturday night, Kansas jumped out to 40-12 (!) lead over North Carolina in the second. Then North Carolina rallied to cut their deficit to only 6 points (!!!) halfway through the second half. Kansas held off the comeback and finished the game with a comfortable lead, moving to the championship game. I know I should have been rooting for Kansas, a fellow Big XII school, but I admit I wanted North Carolina — I am a huge fan of the coach Roy Williams and their long tradition.
- The championship game on Monday night was one of the best championship games of all-time. The teams traded the lead back and forth, never more than seven points, until Memphis appeared to have the game won when they pulled ahead by nine points with two minutes to go. Against all hope, Kansas hit some big three-point shots — with Memphis missing some important free throws — to tie the game and then easily win it in overtime.
Congratulations to the Kansas Jayhawks.
CBS compiles a montage of clips from throughout the tournament called “One Shining Moment”, which they play every year at the end of the championship game. This montage provides, and I look forward to it every year. (I only missed it once: in 2003, I got so upset that Roy Williams and Kansas lost to Syracuse that I forgot all about it that night.) If you missed it, be sure to check out this year’s montage online.
Last year during March Madness, our son Garrett was born. This year, we celebrated his first birthday with a basketball-themed party on the night of the Final Four. He opened presents and ate his first bite of cake.
I wanted to direct other geeky web developers to something cool I discovered this year while following March Madness. ESPN has created a web-based tournament bracket with HTML and CSS. The design is elegant, the markup is very clean, and it is filled with hypertext goodness. (If you are not a geeky web developer, you can pretend that you never read this.)
