This, at last, is what normal feels like.
Two full-throated crowds thrilled to the men’s NCAA basketball tournament at KeyBank Center on Thursday. And the sound and fury animated the arena in a way that postseason college hoops hadn’t felt like in forever.
The men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments got canceled in 2020 — and, for many of us, that was the moment when we came to understand the routine-altering nature of “the coronavirus,” as we called it then.
Last year, when the tournaments returned, they were played in a “bubble,” that euphemism for the antiseptic nature of keeping a virus at bay by keeping the people away.
On Thursday, as the main draw of the men’s tournament began, the people came back to where they once belonged. And the fans in Buffalo roared with delight. They cheered for the teams on the floor, of course. But they were cheering for themselves, too.
And for normalcy.
You can still have your office pools in a bubble. You can watch a bubble tournament as a TV event. But to really feel the game in your gut, you need people packed in seats. You need cheerleaders, and bands, and the buzz that builds as an underdog takes a brand name to the wire.
Al McGuire, the poet laureate of college basketball, understood this. Once, in the late 1980s, I called him for USA Today to ask about why we love the tournament so dearly. At first he talked about the drama inherent in the format: Survive and advance. Lose and go home. Russian roulette, he called it.
And then he said something about the nature of the tournament that has stuck with me all these years:
“It quivers,” he said. “It’s alive.”
The return of the NCAAs to Buffalo coincided with St. Patrick’s Day. Hereabouts that felt like a harmonic convergence: The beer green, the basketballs orange, and all is right with the world.
Or so it seems for as long as the ball bounces. All is not really right with the world, of course. We welcome March madness to forget about a madman dropping bombs on maternity wards.
By now the Final Four weekend is an unofficial national holiday, the way St. Paddy’s is a festive feast in South Buffalo.
The men’s tournament will go on for several more weeks. Many of us will watch all of it. By now the Final Four weekend is an unofficial national holiday, the way St. Paddy’s is a festive feast in South Buffalo.
Still, the truth remains there is nothing quite like Thursday and Friday of the NCAAs’ opening week. Every dog has its day, and these are the days when some underdogs have theirs. Big names from big schools will be there at the end. But the first week offers the best days of all.
And so it was on Thursday at KeyBank, where a pair of 12 seeds dropped a pair of 5s: Richmond over Iowa and New Mexico State over Connecticut. Elsewhere, 15-seed Saint Peter’s shocked 2-seed Kentucky. That would have been hard to imagine in January, when Canisius beat Saint Peter’s.
The other underdogs in Buffalo came close: 4-seed Arkansas edged 13-seed Vermont, and 4-seed Providence got by 13-seed South Dakota State. You could feel the Buffalo crowd pulling hard for the Dakotans. Never mind that most of us didn’t know the Jackrabbits from jackhammers until this week.
That’s the genius of the tournament. We get to fall in love with fresh faces from schools we never knew.
That’s the genius of the tournament. We get to fall in love with fresh faces from schools we never knew.
Backdoor cuts just aren’t the same when the front doors are locked. Praise be, the doors of KeyBank Center opened wide on Thursday. The people came. And the tournament is back.
It quivers. It is alive, again.
A special FREE watch party to support the 2022 UB Women's Basketball team's first game of the NCAA tournament will be held inside the Rose Bar and Grille located downtown Buffalo at 199 Scott St, Buffalo, NY 14204 at 3 pm. This location was chosen to be the official "2022 Buffalo Bullpen" for this game because of its proximity to Key Bank Center and the fact that it is a black woman-owned establishment.
Erik Brady was sports columnist at the Courier-Express when it folded in 1982. He retired in 2019 after 36 years as a sports reporter at USA Today.