Enjoy The Ride
I was listening to our pal Mark Titus on his show - which, you guessed it, is named the Mark Titus Show.
He said something in this that really needs to be talked about more. It's about enjoying the ride in March. It's different for every team. For some it's fighting on the bubble, for some it's making a Final Four or winning the title. For others it's just being disruptive and ruining people's seasons. Whatever it is, it's something I need to tell myself and everyone should do.
Enjoy the ride.
If you're a diehard you've been living and dying with your team for months now. You overreacted to a win or loss in the regular season. Not me, I'm always rational and level-headed when it comes to Kentucky, but others, others overreact. Now we have the country coming together to talk about brackets and bubble talk and everything else that comes along with it. The beauty of it all? Whatever happened in the regular season could not matter one iota in the span of a couple of games. Ohio State should be in the NCAA Tournament right now and that's a team who fired their head coach last month. Indiana State's season is over, losing in the MVC title game and is now stuck waiting until Sunday night just to see if they get to play in beautiful Dayton, Ohio.
I'm not exactly breaking news here that March is a fucking war. You're battling 14 hours of games during a day, you have to have the correct amount of screens and be a master with the remote and what game gets priority. You're battling opposing fans, your own fanbase and yourself. The fact is no one wants their season to end. That's why we can't look forward to Sunday just yet. We can't talk about next week just yet. We need to talk about today and really game by game.
You could argue that yesterday, today or maybe even tomorrow is the best day in college basketball. It's the day we have the most games, you have teams season's ending, you have semifinals (my personal favorite day of tournaments) and everything else going on. Embrace it. Cherish it.
Be miserable when it's over, celebrate if you're the one team who won the thing and enjoy the ride.