My sincere apologies for being so negligent in posting on the progress of this year’s March Madness Idiots’Hoopla group. It seems I have been too busy caring about the results to bother sharing them with others.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet that I’m actually going to be attending this year’s Final Four. Each year, a small portion of tickets is made available to the general public via lottery. Every year mom mom enters and every year she does not win. Until this year. This year, my mom and I are flying to Atlanta to see the final three games of the tournament. And our beloved Blue Devils came 20 minutes away from securing a ticket to see us there.

As anyone who follows college basketball knows, Duke was thoroughly trounced in the second half of yesterday’s game versus Louisville. The better team won, but this knowledge did little to lift my dampened spirits. I woke this morning realizing that, now that my team has been eliminated, it was high time to have a look at the brackets to see how the rest of you are doing.

As it turns out, the quest for the prize in the Idiots’Hoopla group is all but spoken for.

limint83 (whose identity is a mystery to me) leads by 60 points with three games to go and has the most possible points remaining of anyone within striking distance. In deference to basketball that still lies ahead, we sill not yet name an official winner, but let’s just say for sure that it won’t be me.

Scanning the small handful of people below me on the leader board, I can see that most of them are children or people who are professed haters of basketball.

Picking with one’s heart simply isn’t the way to go. And yet, this time next year, regardless of records or expert predictions, I’m guessing my bracket will lean blue.