Because I am currently in first place in my group’s March Madness bracketing, I’ll reveal my system. It seems to be working as well as my granddaughter who, last year, got a long way in her brackets by picking the winners based on their mascots. Cutest won, I think.

I wish my system was as sweet.

March Madness Experience logo

March Madness Experience logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mine is simple and fast: pick the games based on ranking and, when rankings get close toward the center of the bracket, go with defense. We’ll see how that works out in the final rounds.

But my favorite March Madness story goes back many years, when I was a cub reporter on a tiny newspaper that didn’t even have typesetting capability. This was waaaay before the Internet.

So I traveled to another site a hour away once a week to get our newspaper typeset, arranged, and sent off to the print shop.

One of the employees at our sister site was big into office pools and he insisted that I put in my dollar for the March Madness brackets. Each round required a new dollar but I wouldn’t see him for a week. A dollar seemed a polite and easy way out of plunking down a dollar a day.

When I got back a week later, I discovered that I had won the first day’s pool.  And Kent reinvested my winnings because he knew I’d want to do that. Uh-huh.

Well, I won a second time during that week. And Kent knew I’d want in every day.

By the time I got back to manage my winnings, there were none.

So that year I won twice in March Madness, had nothing to show for it, and it only cost me a dollar.

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