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When it comes to hoops, The Madness eludes New Englanders

By Staff | Mar 8, 2013

ESPN NH 900-AM host Matt Perrault will write periodic columns for nashuatelegraph.com. He can be heard weekday afternoons on The Home Team.

Welcome to March, the best sports month of the year in my opinion, or as New England sports fans call it, the third month on their Red Sox calendar.

New England just doesn’t understand what all this ‘madness’ is about and it is the biggest whiff for sports entertainment that I have ever seen. I’m talking about a Jose Canseco swing-and-miss sized wind-maker, because the NCAA Tournament is the greatest event we put on as a country. The “Big Dance” is 60-plus games of amazing displays of athletic performance and school spirit and here in New England we simply can’t figure out what all the fuss is about.

Now, don’t tell me that you love filling out a bracket every year, so that makes you a college hoops fan; your sister probably beats you every year in your family pool. We aren’t real fans here.

What makes someone a fan of college hoops? I’m talking about being able to tell me, quickly, what school Doug McDermott plays for or who is currently the Associated Press No. 1 ranked team.

Don’t try; most of you will need Google to answer correctly (Creighton and Gonzaga are the answers).

In cities like New York, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, college basketball fans are glued to their favorite Bracketology website to find out if their team is going to get an invite to the NCAA Tournament. Those fans even known enough to call into sports talk radio to ask questions and the hosts can actually answer intelligently.

Not here in New England. We prefer practice baseball.

As a freshman in college at UMass in 1996, I felt like I had been cheated for years from not getting exposed to this amazing sport as I watched UMass reach the Final

Four. Marcus Camby and John Calipari drove me to camp out for tickets and go bonkers in the stands for my school.

My love of college basketball was born that year.

I was lucky to then spend 12 seasons covering college hoops around the country, so I know the sport has plenty of problems that can drive people away. From dirty AAU coaches to players who don’t go to class, there are visible warts that the NCAA doesn’t like to talk about. Yet, every March, 68 teams act out four weeks of straight drama. It’s not professional sports, but there is something special about these young adults playing their guts out for the name on the front of the jersey (in most cases).

From sea to shining sea, in small college towns and big cities alike, everyone is talking about college hoops right now … but us. We would rather talk about a rookie pitcher’s performance in a spring training game or a midweek regular season contest in the NBA.

New England water cooler experts can tell you the dimensions of Fenway South or Paul Pierce’s free throw percentage in overtime games but they can’t tell you where the Final Four will be held this year (Atlanta).

It really is our loss.

It’s not only fly-over country that cares about college basketball. Conference tournaments like the Missouri Valley Conference held in St. Louis or the Big East in New York grab headlines for four to five days as thousands of fans travel hundreds of miles to cheer on their teams. Those fans live and die with every bucket and the pressure felt by all is unreal.

I do understand that we love a winner around here and the fact we haven’t had one in nearly two decades really hurts. Harvard has had a nice little run but people are not going to cheer for their future bosses. Boston College hasn’t been good in basketball since they went to the ACC. UNH hasn’t been much to talk about since the mid-90’s.

Providence is an up-and-down program in the Big East and even though Vermont has been good recently (NCAA’s last year for instance), it is in, well, Vermont.

There isn’t a lot of talent to watch on the New England college courts these days.

What is so disappointing to me is that some of the best high school basketball talent in the country plays right here in the Granite State. Our prep schools are stocked with stud players from around the country, but in most cases, those players already have an idea of where they want to play in college and it’s not in New England.

Having a program in these parts good enough to change that would surely help grow college hoops in New England, but that’s unlikely right now.

If you pay attention, the drama of the NCAA tournament is unmatched. I will never forget being court-side as Ali Farokhmanesh of Northern Iowa hit the 3 of his life to knock out No. 1 seed Kansas. For the rest of his life, television networks will be interviewing him when Johnny Appleseed college bounces the giant from the Big Dance. We know the name of Valpo’s Bryce Drew because of his answered prayer versus Ole Miss, and who can forget Christian Laettner’s turn around jumper against Kentucky.

Whose name will we remember after this year’s NCAA Tournament when it begins on March 19? That’s why I watch and it’s why you should too and it has nothing to do with the five-buck-a-sheet pool your cubicle-mate is running for the office.

Don’t worry, the Red Sox will be playing games that count soon enough.

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