It was paradise for a basketball junkie. This past week, dubbed ‘Championship Week’ by ESPN, produced so much basketball that it was impossible to take it all in; games were everywhere, as up to six channels at a time on my cable system delivered an avalanche of competition between not only the marquee powers and conferences of the sport but every other league as well. It was the week of the conference tournament, where every team with dreams of Final Four glory starts fresh, with at least a theoretical chance of crashing the Big Dance.

Well, almost. It seems that with all of this basketball, seemingly hundreds of games and literally hundreds of thousands of minutes, of all of the dunks, jump shots, lay-ups, foul shots, man-to-man defenses, zone defenses, miraculous comebacks, blown leads, exhilarating wins, devastating losses, coaches face down at midcourt pounding the floor with joy at an unexpected victory, coaches attempting to hang themselves from the nearest goal following a shocking and unexpected defeat, fans storming the court in jubilation, fans chasing their coach with buckets of tar and bales of feathers, not the first second was played by Tech. Oh, well. This is what happens when you finish on the wrong side of a tournament exclusion bracket.

Championship Week began with a couple of nights of championship games from the lower orders, conferences charitably referred to as ‘Mid-majors’ by the pundits, who never tell us the identity of the low-major leagues. These conferences reveled in their annual fifteen minutes and performed their usual function of supplying the 14-16 seeds, opening round fodder for the power teams, although every year there is a surprise or two, always missed by me as I fill out tournament brackets.

The highlight was NCAA Tournament qualification by a school known as IUPUI, which won whatever league would take someone with that name. I had never heard of those initials grouped together in relation to college basketball or anything else until I observed the Jaguars take the floor and win their conference. As some ESPN talking head explained that the letters stood for Indiana University Purdue University-Indianapolis, it occurred to me that a bit more imagination was shown in the naming of the NOVA Graduate Center. VPISUUVA-NOVA?

On Wednesday the big boys kicked in with the opening of the Big East Tournament. The two teams that had scratched and clawed to make the field, WVU and Miami, were both gone before the first day’s festivities ended, although the Canes did get to hang around New York City for at least one day while they waited to get pounded by Seton Hall in a late game that had me speculating on how badly the Hall's Andre Barrett would have abused Tech’s lousy guards. Maybe it was just as well.

By Thursday afternoon as the BE moved into the quarterfinal round and the basketball schools began dropping out, with the exception of heavyweight UConn, which will soon also be counted on the football side of things, I began to get the itch to watch some tournament basketball in person. Since Tech’s efforts against both Miami and WVU had conspired to cancel my proposed trip to New York [it is, after all, all about me], I turned to Plan B, which involved attendance at the tournament being staged in my back yard by the ACC. I was off to Greensboro.

The first order of business was ticket procurement, so I decided to employ the tried and true method of waiting outside the Greensboro Coliseum until Clemson had played its first game and finding a Tiger fan willing to pause long enough to sell his remaining tickets before charging back to South Carolina to begin observance of the high holy days known as Spring Practice, a religious occasion of which we know a thing or two at Tech. The Tigers had obliged the ticket hunter by losing their way into the play-in game, meaning there would be entire ticket books for the Friday quarterfinals available. The Tigers became, in the 50th ACC Tournament, the first school to reach fifty tournament losses. Perhaps Clemson and the ACC need to learn from Tech and the Big East that you can’t lose conference tournament games if you are not participating.

Before beginning my ticket vigil outside the Coliseum I determined that the arduous fifty-mile trek to Greensboro required me to refresh myself, so I ducked into my favorite local tavern. My ticket problems were solved when I saw an old friend and Carolina alumnus, a gentleman whose first ex-wife had thrown him out of their domicile within minutes of mine doing the same, in part because we had spent so much time together in Danville bars watching sporting events. I had not seen him since he had made a successful escape from Danville many years ago. I found him in the exact same attitude as the last time I had laid eyes on him over twenty years ago, perched on a bar stool watching televised basketball. He apparently has an employer who not only allows him to sit around bars and attend basketball tournaments but supplies tickets as well; he had several ticket books and gladly handed one over to me. I had copped, and we both decided that since Clemson and Florida State were playing basketball rather than football, there was no point in going to the ACC’s opening game and instead decided to observe the night’s Big East games on the bar television.

Tech was obviously not only not playing in the Big East tournament but weren’t in the ACC one as well, but we were a hot topic around the Greensboro Coliseum, as Maryland assistant Dave Dickerson was openly campaigning for the Tech job. He had taken note of our Athletic Director’s stipulation that the new coach will have had prior head coaching experience unless he does not and was loudly proclaiming to any media outlet within earshot that a current assistant should be given a fair chance, and he had just the assistant in mind. Dickerson stopped just short of following up the National Anthem with a singing of Tech Triumph, wearing an autographed #7 football jersey to the Maryland bench and going onto the arena floor during television breaks and doing the Hokie Pokey. The man wants the job.

Dickerson should perhaps have spent more time on his current team’s preparation, as Maryland was quickly bounced out of the tournament in a major upset by North Carolina, whose team seemed to have reacted to the threat of coach Matt Doherty’s imminent dismissal in a much different manner than did the Tech team to the job security of Ricky Stokes.

This big win by the Tar Heels, however, did not produce a tremendous amount of joy on the part of my buddy, who firmly counts himself among those Carolina partisans who want Doherty gone right now. He glumly took stock of Carolina’s last two wins over ACC heavyweights Duke and Maryland and sourly proclaimed that this might save Matt’s job, and how lucky were we Hokies in that Ricky Stokes cooperated in his firing by losing his last two games. I replied that that was one way of looking at it and pointed out that our Athletic Director claimed to have made the decision to terminate Ricky following Tech’s thrashing of Villanova, so perhaps there was hope, yet.

The first round ended with the four North Carolina members of the ACC still standing. This was regarded within that state as the natural order of things. Many Hokies, especially those who think that changing our basketball fortunes and status will be a fairly simple matter, are not aware that the basketball culture in that state is so ingrained in the fabric of society that one can stop at a Reidsville convenience market and find two gentlemen wearing hats celebrating Dale Earnhart discussing not Junior’s chances at Darlington but whether Matt’s boys can teach those Yankee [expletive deleted] from Duke another lesson.

It also should be noted that a blue-chip talent from our state, Roanoke’s JJ Redick, barely gave Tech, or the Hoos for that matter, a sideways glance before he lit out for Tobacco Road and turned in a remarkable performance in the tournament championship game in leading Duke to yet another title. That the state’s top talent got away so easily demonstrates the hold ACC basketball, particularly that played in North Carolina, has on so many kids, and how tough it will be for Tech.

Pittsburgh, in winning the BE championship with a gutsy and courageous performance, showed that things can be turned around in a relatively short period of time providing you have an excellent coach, terrific senior guard play by Brandin Knight, an administrative commitment that so far Tech has only paid lip service to, and top-notch facilities provided by taxpayers, but they don’t have what we have lurking on their southern border.

The conference tournaments are out of the way and now we move onto the NCAA Tournament, provided that the long bombs launched by three-point shooters are not disrupted by bombs of another kind. I have surveyed the brackets closely and again do not find Tech listed, which is not exactly news. I also don’t see Boston College, the chief victims of the hose wielded by the NCAA Selection Committee, which didn’t seem to be impressed by BC’s season’s sweep of Tech.

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