A REALLY long post that has absolutely nothing to do with education

I'm back! Did you miss me?

For my dad's birthday last June (yes, June), I gave him a calendar with a couple of specific dates circled in the instructions to keep those dates clear. Ever since they announced that the Final Four would be in San Antonio this year, I had been trying to get tickets for us to go. One NCAA rejection and 2 eBay scam attempts later, I finally had tickets and we were set.

Saturday morning, my dad and I took off from his house and made the roughly 5-hour drive down to San Antonio. Once there, we wasted little time in dropping our stuff off at the hotel and making our way down to the Alamodome. If you've ever been to the Alamodome, then you know it's roughly the size of Arkansas. There is a curtain that cuts the floor of the dome in half, and the basketball court and most of the seats are on one side of that curtain. OUR seats, were on the OTHER side of the curtain.

This picture gives you a pretty good idea of what our "distant view" was like:

We slid over a few sections and tried to claim squatters' rights on some of the seats over there. That didn't work out so well for us. We kept getting bumped, over a few seats, then down a row, then down another. Pretty soon, there was no place for us to go, and people were giving us evil looks. So we went back over to our section where there were LOTS of seats available (go figure!), moved up a few rows so we could get a better view over the curtain, and settled in to watch the two games of the evening. Thankfully, I have a very powerful set of binoculars that made it seem like I was on the floor. (And the binoculars WERE trained on the action when the clock was running -- during all timeouts, they were trained on a certain redheaded Kansas cheerleader with very nice abs...).

First up was Memphis vs. UCLA. I had thought that Memphis was a poser all season long, but they handled UCLA pretty well. I was surprised to see UCLA go down so easily. Even bringing out their secret weapon, Lorenzo Mata (aka Seth Green) didn't seem to help much.

Separated at birth?

But then it was time for the game of the weekend. Kansas vs. North Carolina. As a Duke alum, I always root for ANYONE who's playing against Carolina. So I had my recently-purchased Kansas shirt on, and I was cheering full force for the Jayhawks.

Something I noticed -- there seems to be a little bit of bad blood between Kansas and Roy Williams. Maybe they're still bitter that he left Kansas to go coach at North Carolina. Maybe they felt like they had something to prove. Maybe they were hyped up on Red Bull. Whatever the reason, they came out and DEMOLISHED the Tar Heels in the first half. Can you say 40 to 12??? Of course, I think everyone knew that Carolina was going to come back, much like the sociopathic killer in a slasher flick. They actually did close it to four points once, but then Kansas ran away again.

When the Final Four was played in San Antonio in 1998, my dad and I went, and we got to see North Carolina get beaten by Stanford. So it occurs to me, I can take total credit for their demise. Any time the University of North Carolina plays in the Final Four in San Antonio, Texas -- if I am present, they will lose!

Monday night, championship game, Memphis vs. Kansas. At this point, I'm feeling like I did my undergraduate studies in Lawrence, as I have totally jumped on the Kansas bandwagon. Rock, Chalk, Jaywalk indeed!

I won't go into the game play-by-play, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that it was the greatest championship game in NCAA tournament history. Sure, I'm partial to the three championship games that my beloved Duke Blue Devils won, but none of them had a buzzer beater and five minutes of overtime. We really got more bang for our buck last night. Down three, with 4 seconds left in the game, Mario Chalmers of Kansas hit a shot that tied the game and sent it into OT. I was high fiving my dad, high fiving random stranger, high fiving empty seats behind me. It was AWESOME, baby!!

Today, I returned home, and tomorrow I have to report back to the school. March Madness is officially over for another year. Which means that the March Monday Madness Contest is officially over as well. Thank you to everyone who participated. I will draw the names of two winners later this evening and post them here.

In other totally random news, I have a bit of a Scooby Doo mystery on my hands. For the past couple of weeks, someone has been stealing my newspaper. If I go outside and bring it in before I leave my house at 6:30 in the morning, all is well. But if I DON'T get it in the morning, it's often not there in the evening when I get home. I've even done a little test where I looked out my window in the morning, saw it was there, and then found it missing that evening.

Today, when I got home, I should have had four papers (Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday). There were two out there. But the really strange part is this. Lying right in the middle of my yard, just a bit wet from a recent rain, was a twenty dollar bill. How freaking odd is that???

Maybe I should leave a sign out in my yard says, "GO BUY YOUR OWN PAPER!!!"