The first Thursday of the NCAA Tournament there is a change in the Westlake atmosphere. Every sports fan has their iPad or phone out to watch a game. The Wifi runs slower and no one pays attention in class. You can hear conversations on the status of brackets, the guys watching games on computers and the groans and cheers at the end of a tight game. It seems like every game is a close game. You can’t not love the tournament.

Every year basketball fans wait all season long for March Madness. When selection Sunday rolls around we sit in front of our TVs hoping our favorite teams will make the tournament with a good seed. Then the process of filling out brackets begins. We painstakingly go over every game hoping we are making the right choices. Every year I come out of this process feeling very confident in my selections; then the tournament begins and year after year my bracket fails me. But I will never leave my love-hate relationship with March Madness.

March Madness gives everyone something to root for. The desire for your bracket to do well makes any fan extremely attached to the teams they want to win. This year I started off the first day of play with an almost perfect bracket. I picked all the right upsets, Dayton over Ohio State and Harvard over Cincinnati. I knew this would be the year I would have an amazing bracket. I was wrong. The second day rolled around and my bracket took a nose dive. It all started with Duke’s unexpected loss to Mercer. But that’s OK. When your bracket has no chance left it is time to just sit back and enjoy watching the games. There is always at least one crazy underdog that keeps advancing. You have no choice but to root for them. Currently all of my final four teams are still in the tournament, so I still have a chance of picking the winner. Now it is up to Florida to make it to the finals and keep my bracket alive.