Apologies for failing to check in after the rounds of 16 and 8. Apologies for letting three full days pass before announcing the results of this year’s Idiots’Hoopla Bracket Challenge.
My passion for this tournament faded hard when my Blue Devils made their dispiriting first-round exit to unheralded Mercer. But you deserve better than my blunted enthusiasm.
And so I will rise up and share the results. Here are the top ten finishers.
Alas, none of you guessed that the eventual champion would be the Huskies of Connecticut, though the seven highest point earners each chose either Arizona, Florida, or Wisconsin to cut down the nets.
Our champion, Topology Kate, chose Arizona, and eked out a narrow victory over rower97bu, who, in addition to needing a tutorial on naming conventions, also chose Arizona to win it all.
But what else can I offer by way of insightful comments? I’m grasping to make sense of it all, that I might not do so horribly next year. Can logic ever overcome emotion? Can we, as a people, learn from our mistakes? History suggests that the answer is no.
Case in point: those of us who chose Duke as champion finished near the bottom of the standings. Note: I am related to exactly all of these people.
Though Tillyhp, bold in her prediction that Louisiana Lafayette would win it all, did even worse.
The tournament is over. I can only take solace in the fact that each of the nine 2014 preseason top-25 polls that I have so far read considers Duke among the top 2-3 teams in the country. Which is to say, my hopes are sufficiently high that the insult of an early-round exit will be all the more crushing next year.
Thanks, all of you, for making your picks and joining the fun.
And congratulations again to TopologyKate, who has earned a free year of Idiots’Books.
Until the Madness returns again next March…
