Reporter loses UHCL March Madness Tournament Challenge with Gonzaga pick
The headline that I originally planned for this article before Gonzaga’s championship game loss April 3 read, “Reporter wins UHCL March Madness Tournament Challenge with brilliant Gonzaga pick.” However, I now realize that I put a curse on Gonzaga’s championship hopes long before that.
Now, I know that Gonzaga’s loss in the championship game was karma for my saying that I regretted picking them to win it all in my last March Madness article. The sports gods do not take kindly to people who second-guess their picks, and I am entirely convinced that this is the reason Gonzaga came up short.
After the first two rounds of the tournament, I began to lose confidence in many of my picks (especially Gonzaga) and I wish that I had picked other teams that ended up not going very far anyway.
I should have had confidence in my Gonzaga pick from the beginning, and I owe an apology to the players and coaches of Gonzaga for losing faith in them after their narrow, uninspiring win over Northwestern University. They can put the blame on me.
However, I also have to give credit to the champions, the North Carolina Tar Heels, for beating Gonzaga after losing on a buzzer beater last year to Villanova in the championship game. You could tell that North Carolina did not want to come up short again, and they just executed better than Gonzaga down the stretch of the 4th quarter.
After Gonzaga’s impressive 24-point win in the Elite Eight, I started to realize that they might actually have a chance to go all the way. By then I was completely back on the Gonzaga bandwagon.
My bracket ended placing No. 11 out of the 39 brackets in the UHCL March Madness group, which would have sat well with me had I not come within a couple of missed Gonzaga 3-pointers away from finishing in first place and winning some sort of prize. I do not know what that prize would have been, but as a competitive person, I still wanted it.
Despite the fact that I came so close to picking the champion, I whiffed on many of my other picks throughout the tournament. Gonzaga carried my mediocre bracket on its shoulders a very long way, and I will always be thankful to them for that.
But as my high school basketball coach used to say, “winning is not everything.” Although he would follow that by saying that it is the only thing.
Filling out a bracket and keeping up with it is always something fun to do each year with friends who do it as well. This year was the first time that my championship pick has ever actually reached the championship game, so I definitely had fun bragging about that while I could.
I have really enjoyed highlighting the highs and lows of my March Madness bracket through this series of articles and I encourage everyone to fill out their own bracket next year if they have not done so before. Although not everyone may like it as much as other big sports fans, the thrill of competition and being correct is something that everyone can enjoy.
Also published on Medium.
