Commentary: More than ever, March Madness proves a fickle, vengeful beast

Yeah, you had some nerve, filling the streets of Chapel Hill like that way back on the first Saturday night in March. I’m all for exuberance and rivalry and getting outdoors and all of it, especially while in college, but a bacchanal like that after a win in the regular season? I’ll show you.

I am March Madness, and I will not be upstaged.

You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to have Duke and North Carolina play again, like they’ve never done in all the 257 times they’ve played, in my tournament. I’ll take them from some unassuming seedings like Nos. 2 and 8, and I’ll carry them all the way through the East and West regionals until they ram into each other at the brink of the real end. I’ll make it so Mike Krzyzewski’s last game against North Carolina, that one from March 5, wasn’t Mike Krzyzewski’s last game against North Carolina. And I’m going to have them play in New bloody Orleans, so Duke and North Carolina fans will swarm and swirl around the French Quarter and everyone else will wind up nauseous.

If that sounds mad, that’s who I am. I am one fickle, vengeful beast.

Oh, I’ll gussy up a Final Four with the kingdoms of Duke, North Carolina, Kansas and Villanova, Final Four regulars, 22 Final Four berths between them this century alone, nobody fewer than four since 2000. I’ll allow the chalk even after I bust all the brackets with my Saint Peter’s and my whatnot. But I’m going to spice that chalk with the promise of untold pain. I’ll spend two weeks bringing a young Duke team from unsure to cocksure, and a thin North Carolina team from skittish to soaring, and then I’ll run them against each other until some fan base falls from the clouds all the way down into a woe damned-near eternal, drowning in their own loathing.

That’s what I’m about more than anything: pain. I’m about crying locker rooms much more than snipping nets. It’s even part of my appeal.

I’ll make things so awkward that people won’t even talk about it at their regionals. North Carolina’s Armando Bacot will get 20 points and 22 rebounds in an East Region final in Philadelphia on the way to the Final Four, such a matter of joy and hope, and then say of that Final Four, “I don’t really want to answer that right now. It’s a good question. But I can’t answer it right now. ‘Coach’ will get mad at me.” I’ll have that first-year coach, Hubert Davis, say nothing could be as crazy as March 5 in Cameron Indoor at Duke, and then I’ll show him crazy.

A curious mind will bring up Duke vs. North Carolina to Duke players after they win the West Region in San Francisco, and Coach K will intercept that question and shield the players right up there on the dais, right up there near his exit after 42 Duke seasons: “You know what, it’s going to be an honor for us to go against whoever is the regional champion of that region, and there’s no greater day in college basketball than when those four regional champions, four champions, get in one arena and play.”

Look how he ran off to somewhere else with that, like people often do when pain lurks.

I’ll have my usual charms along the way to distract from the excruciation. I’ll introduce the whole nation to the term “Peacock Nation,” as if the whole nation might become Peacock Nation. I’ll take some anonymous No. 15 seed like the Saint Peter’s Peacocks, some team that finished second in its own hidden regular season, with attendance figures in the triple digits, and I’ll run it all the way to the Elite Eight, like it’s never been done before. I’ll have one player, KC Ndefo, saying, “What we did was amazing,” and their coach, Shaheen Holloway, saying when it’s done, “It’s my job as their leader to cheer them up, make sure they understand what they did the last two weeks.”

I’ll have my usual buffet of results that seem to make no sense, like fresh, hot Big Ten champion Iowa losing to Richmond, or like Auburn getting stomped by Miami (Fla.), or like Kentucky and Murray State and Purdue toppled by Saint Peter’s. I’ll usher Iowa State from two wins in one whole season (2020-21) to two wins and the Sweet 16 in one quick tournament (2022). I’ll make Gonzaga sad; I’m good at that. I’ll sic Houston on opponents until opponents seem to say, ‘Just get me out of here and let me go home.’ I’ll make a reborn Arizona escape TCU except then it has to play Houston. I’ll have North Carolina lead by 25 on Baylor and go on to win the game – in overtime.

I’ll have Kansas out there running around but nobody paying much attention, until that sage Jim Larrañaga stands 20 minutes from another Final Four with a 10 seed (Miami Hurricanes) to go with the one he got in 2006 with an 11 (George Mason). Then I’ll have Kansas forge a remarkable 47-15 second half, and then I’ll have veteran coach Bill Self explain it: “There really wasn’t (any moving speech). I’m not good at those type of things. I told them we need to play better.”

Oh.

I’ll have Jay Wright around near the end because everybody likes Jay Wright and, miraculously, so do I. Make it three Final Fours in the last six, and have him get to it by way of Texas where he won the previous two, and have somebody ask this Philadelphian what it is about Texas, and have him say, “I think barbecue.”

Look at the fun and frivolity, for it distracts from the excruciation. I never let Duke and North Carolina play each other in one of my tournaments before, but only because it always seemed too obvious, too trite. I’ve let them into 38 Final Fours, 21 for North Carolina and 17 for Duke, but only one together. That’s that weird one in 1991, when Hubert Davis himself scored 25 points in that semifinal against Kansas, but I intervened and tilted things sideways so that Kansas beat North Carolina and Dean Smith got ejected and CBS reported on some kind of mild kerfuffle in the hallway involving that sweet old assistant, Bill Guthridge.

Now, that was mad.

Duke had to beat Kansas in that final, because I wouldn’t have it, not Duke-North Carolina, but then you people had to go and meddle with the forces of nature as goes the great old movie line. You had to have your big party on the first Saturday in March as if something final had occurred, and I got jealous and peeved, and now some set of fans will be trudging back through Bourbon Street and Jackson Square with an agony that sears like no other.

I am pure hell.