It’s all about March Madnezz…

There are several things to note about the mostly unloved month of March. The lion it comes in with hangs around far too long. Early season baseball is almost as miserable as late season baseball. Reasonable golf is still a month away. And the NCAA tournament is the only thing around to help real spring get started.

Now basketball was once only a winter game, popular because high school gyms and church basements were reliably heated and inexpensive gathering spots. The college season, though, kept on getting longer and longer because ESPN could fill only so many time slots with Australian Rules Football, PBA bowling and death-defying poker matches. 

What we have now is modern basketball, a game where the unbelievable athletic skill of the players simply brushes aside any of the limitations offered by the height of the basket, the length of the court or even the size of the players.

The current style is that every team plays some variation of what is called four out or five out offenses. In a four out, everyone except the center is out by the three point line, and in five out, he joins them out there as well. 

Now you have as many as five guys, all of whom can play above the basket (and in some cases WAY ABOVE the basket) jockeying to shoot a three or drive to the hoop. And that is about it! In order to seriously tax these fellow, you would have to put goals in villages 5 miles apart, the way Native Americans used to play lacrosse, and make certain the hoops were 15 feet high.

Basketball has become the most “entertaining” of sports, meaning that slam dunks, nasty rejections and shots from “way downtown” become the criteria by which excellence is denoted. Winning and losing is still important, just ask a recently fired coach, but the style with which one wins is as important as the end result.

I really don’t know what to do with this embarrassment of athletic riches. I guess I am not enough of a stylist to really cotton to it, but there is another venue.

Women’s basketball is something I can more readily understand. They run plays; they set high and low posts; they pass the ball; they set picks like they mean it; and, most surprisingly, they tend to do it as a team. Most often, the players really seem to care about each other.

So while everyone is getting their brackets busted in the men’s game, over the next few days, I’ll be watching the women play the game in a way some of us oldsters can actually cheer for. Whichever one is your cup of tea, here’s hoping the office pool is all yours to swim away with.

Millerton resident Theodore Kneeland is a retired teacher and coach.