March Madness strikes, no cure in sight

It's called & quot;March Madness, & quot; but the NCAA basketball tournament has already turned into March Misery for some of the more highly vaunted teams in the one-strike-and-you're-out tourney. Ohio State's squad was nearly one of those to exit early. But mercifully, the Buckeyes, Kent State, Cincinnati and Xavier are still in their respective brackets.
Gonzaga and the University of Southern California, upset by hitherto lesser lights weren't so lucky. In the metaphor of the tournament, their golden coaches have turned back into pumpkins; their ball gowns, back to rags.
It's curious, is it not, that toweringly tall grown men, most of whom could make mincemeat out of any Prince Charming, compete to be in the & quot;Sweet Sixteen & quot; hoping that this year will be their Cinderella season. Can anyone envision even the newly pleasant Bobby Knight as anybody's fairy godmother?
'Bibbity, bobbity, boo:' But surely, if it's magic that gets these young men onto the list of 64 competitors, somebody has to be chanting & quot;Bibbity, bobbity, boo. & quot;
We'd prefer to think that well-coached talent, skill and just plain grit account for the & quot;magic & quot; on the boards. That, and some inexplicable luck.
Of course, no one should have been surprised to see first-seed Duke annihilate little 16th-seed Winthrop, but 13th-seed Davidson wasn't supposed to make it a one-point game against fourth-seed Ohio State with only seconds to go.
Gonzaga fans railed mightily against their sixth seed. After all, with a record 29-3, everybody knew that they should have been rated so much higher. Everybody that is, except a scrappy team from Wyoming that proved, 73-66, that the selection committee wasn't far off.
North Carolina has a storied basketball past. But the stories have been about North Carolina State and the main campus of the University of North Carolina. So what's little UNC-Wilmington (with just 10,000 students doing whupping the 28,000-student University of Southern California 93-89 in overtime. Another fourth seed bites the dust, and another of the mice turns into a prancing horse for its first NCAA tournament victory.
But that's what makes the NCAA basketball tournament so entertaining. It doesn't always go according to plan. In football, big schools compete against other big schools, medium-size schools play similar size institutions, and smaller schools face off against each other. That makes good sense.
But when it comes to basketball, the situation changes. With a smaller squad to field, even small institutions can be competitive -- and as the opening round of the tournament has shown -- they are.
It looks like the madness is bound to continue.