Spend that Mad money on gas, coffee, antacids

You can do it.

You and a carload of buddies, a loaded-up Starbucks gift card, satellite radio, plenty of deodorant and antacids and Visine, and the ATM card – scalpers don’t take VISA. Maybe – and this might be too much information – an empty pop bottle to facilitate bypassing the usual rest stops.

Don’t forget the cap.

It’s March, time for Madness. So get Mad.

Pile into your car on Wednesday and flog it down to Sacramento to see Washington State and Gonzaga on the same NCAA Men’s Basketball Championships stage Thursday at Arco Arena. Pile back in after the games and blast back to the Spokane Arena by Friday to see what may be the most engaging eight-team field in any of the NCAA’s eight first-round pods.

And then, the basketball gods willing, do it again.

Divvy up the driving. It can be done. MapQuest pegs the trip at 821 miles or 13 hours, 31 minutes. That’ll easily fit between the final horn in Sacramento and opening tip in Spokane.

Of course, your moving violations may vary.

Tell me no tales of Tobacco Road. For this next week, at least, the center of the college basketball universe is the little corridor of Eastern Washington that connects Spokane and Pullman – every bit as much as it’s North Carolina or Kentucky or Columbus, Ohio.

We have known for some time, of course, that Spokane would host one of the tournament parties and it’s been almost a week since we learned that Gonzaga would join Wazzu as one of the field’s 65 teams.

We just didn’t know how deliciously it would play out on Sunday afternoon.

The Cougars were, pretty much as expected, sent to Sacramento, rewarded with a No. 3 seed to play Oral Roberts – the university, not the faith healer – on Thursday.

Then the Zags, to the surprise of many, were also shipped to Sacramento as a 10th seed in the West Region to play Indiana – again. The two teams met in last year’s second round – Gonzaga winning 90-80 – but there’s new intrigue. The Hoosiers are now coached by Kelvin Sampson, the last man before current WSU coach Tony Bennett to take the Cougars to the NCAAs – and the man who ended the annual Gonzaga-WSU series in the late 1980s.

There are, in fact, Zags fans with long memories and short fuses who have been itching for this pairing ever since the Bulldogs began vacationing in Bracketville every March.

(And in another late bulletin from the Dept. of Basketball Animus, Cougars and Zags division, the NIT bracket was announced Sunday evening without the University of Washington among the 32 teams. But the Huskies did make the NOT.)

With no risk of playing each other, the Cougars and Zags can actually be on the same emotional side in Sacramento.

“Spokane would have been ideal but that was obviously out of the question,” said Bennett, whose team was ineligible to play here because the school is serving as tournament host. “But seeing Gonzaga there and UCLA, hopefully we’ll cheer for each other.”

Confirmed Gonzaga coach Mark Few, “I’ll be pulling for the Cougars.”

Having two teams from the Inland Northwest in the tournament isn’t unprecedented, of course – Eastern Washington joined Gonzaga in 2004. But the level of dither is.

The Zags returned to the NCAAs for the ninth consecutive year in a stunning late-season surge after the lows of a December losing slump, the end of their 50-game home court winning streak and, most jarringly, the arrests of two players on drug charges in February.

And the Cougars simply came out of nowhere to write the best basketball story of the 2007 season – vaulting from last place in the Pacific-10 Conference last year to 25 victories, and counting.

Asked what he was doing last Selection Sunday, Bennett laughed.

“I can’t remember,” he said. “I wasn’t watching it with 800 Cougar fans, I can tell you that.”

And should the Cougs and Zags survive Thursday to play another day, Spokane can keep itself occupied with a four-pack of games at the Arena that feature a few of college hoops’ most entertaining teams.

Notre Dame? It might not qualify for that descriptive, but there’s a big enough knot of Irish devotees in Spokane who don’t particularly care – and a big enough knot of Irish detractors who’ll be pulling like crazy for little Winthrop, a Gonzaga victim in the tournament two years ago (but not before leading the Zags at halftime).

Oregon? The Ducks just blitzed through the Pac-10 tournament and even the Cougar in you can’t pull for the Ducks, you can’t help but like the backcourt of Aaron Brooks and 5-foot-6 Tajuan Porter. But how do you not like Miami of Ohio just as much, after the RedHawks got into the field on a banked 3-pointer at the horn?

And Texas only has the best player in the college game, forward Kevin Durant, who warmed up for the NCAAs with 37 points against Kansas on Sunday.

He’s in the late afternoon game on Friday. We’ll understand if you skip out after that one to head back to Sacramento.

Madness calls.