John Blanchette

SALT LAKE CITY – Thinking back, it was maybe 10 minutes into the impossibly fun tale of Gonzaga basketball that the Zags evolved from humble, lovable underdogs into something less appealing in the eyes of a not insignificant segment of the studio audience. Underachievers.

This was supposed to be the year Gonzaga took the last smidgen of suspense out of Selection Sunday. So why were they still sweating it out at 29 minutes after the hour, Bracket Daylight Time?

This was supposed to be the year Gonzaga took the last smidgen of suspense out of Selection Sunday.

LAS VEGAS – The elevator doors at the Orleans Hotel are papered over with the logo for the Western Athletic Conference basketball tournament playing in the arena next door, which otherwise seems to be a secret. The other day a woman pushed the button and waited for a car to arrive, puzzled. “I don’t know what the WAC is,” she confessed to her husband.

LAS VEGAS – Welcome back to the championship game of the West Coast Conference men’s basketball tournament, the defending champs (Saint Mary’s) against the more-often-than-not champs (Gonzaga). Or as it’s familiarly (and we mean familiarly) known, “Once more, with feeling.”

LAS VEGAS – Bumped into those best of friends and Zags fans, Hysteria and Horse Sense, sitting at side-by-side slots at the Orleans Casino. Guess what they were talking about? Horse Sense: “It’s been five days now. Will you give it a rest?”

The North Idaho Cardinals just became big fans of expansion. The National Junior College Athletic Association’s grand basketball extravaganza in Hutchinson, Kan., grows from 16 to 24 teams this year, with four of the berths to be assigned “at-large.”

Until Manti Te’o’s girlfriend shows up in a remake of “Ghost,” sports will continue to get the back of Oscar’s hand. I mean, what’s the “sports” offering at Sunday’s Academy Awards? “Silver Linings Playbook?” Great. Robert DeNiro representing all football fans by being so obsessively dysfunctional about the Philadelphia Eagles that he’s been banned from the stadium for life. He also hectors his bipolar son for dropping the ball on the 1-yard line of life the way DeSean Jackson did on that would-have-been touchdown pass. Because, you know, DeSean Jackson didn’t amount to siccum after that bit of showboating or win the Miracle at the New Meadowlands all by himself.

Confronted with the sudden and unanticipated possibility that they could be playing their last game, the Central Valley Bears arrived at a simple conclusion. “We weren’t going to let that happen,” said Austin Rehkow.