One of the nation’s great annual sporting traditions returned this year. The NCAA men’s and women’s college basketball tournaments are back after a year off for the pandemic. While there are many restrictions on where the games are being played, who gets to watch, and what the players can do when away from the courts, the competition is on. And, as always, both die-hard and casual fans have flocked to their TVs and other devices, interrupting school, work, religious services, and family dinners. It’s the best kind of madness and a welcome respite from the monotony of COVID.The other significant part of March Madness is predicting the outcomes of the games. Even people who never watch a minute of college basketball before the tournament like to participate, and “filling out brackets” has become its own annual tradition. (ESPN even has a resident "bracketologist" named Joe Lunardi.) More an art than a science, predicting games nevertheless entices many people to pore through statistics and data analytics. They work hard to be the winner of the annual office or friend pool. Yet we all know that person who filled out their bracket based on mascot or team colors or some other trivial matter – and won!

Every year at CA there is a little cat-and-mouse game between students and faculty. Will the dedicated sports fan be able to sneak a look at the games that are taking place during the school day? Now that CBS live streams the games, it's not really too hard for anyone to catch a few minutes of the early games. It used to be trickier when a student had to sneak over to the team room in the old gym! At this point, we often try to incorporate the tournaments into our classes somehow and take advantage of the excitement.  Admittedly, most of the action takes place outside of school hours and/or during spring break, so the distractions are really not too much of an issue, and this year in particular it was fun to chat with students about what teams they thought would dominate in the "Big Dance."

Also part of the March Madness fun is the level of unpredictability built into the system, and over the years we have seen numerous examples of underdogs pulling off upsets. Therefore, filling out one’s bracket can certainly be an exercise in futility even in a “normal” year. But how about 2021 when seemingly nothing is normal?Well, in both the men’s and women’s tournaments the unpredictable has happened at a greater rate than it typically does. Higher seeds have been beating lower seeds at an amazing rate, busting brackets from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon, and everywhere in between. By the third night of play, none of the several million participants in ESPN’s contest had a perfect bracket on the men’s side. The “Sweet 16” round featured an 8 seed, a pair of 11 seeds, a 12, and (for the first time ever) a 15. Disruption in a disruptive year – what else is new?Now that we have worked our way to the Final Fours, a little more order has been restored. With the exception of UCLA, the three remaining men’s teams have been elite all year, especially the Gonzaga team that is currently undefeated. The women’s Final Four has also settled into a little more of a predictable pattern and another UConn-Stanford match-up could be coming.Still, it would not surprise me at all if something surprising still awaits us. As most of us tear up our poorly-predicted brackets, perhaps there will be something else that makes 2021 a year to remember.