Bracketology and Life - The Philosophy of a Busted Bracket

          Can you remember how you felt Thursday morning with your bracket freshly picked?  All of your teams were undefeated and looked like sure winners.  Thursday morning before they play the games is one of my favorite days. I dream of Cinderella teams and old favorites that can’t lose.  My bracket is full of winners.  Then they start playing the games. Oh, if they didn’t start playing the games.  How grand it would be. Davidson would win the first two rounds. UNLV would be able to shoot.  Teams would win because they were on my bracket. Upsets would only happen if I called them.   But they do play the games, and my bracket never seems to work out. Davidson has the game won, but then loses in the final seconds, UNLV cannot convert a shot, and Georgetown is not as good as we all thought. The glass slipper fits a team we never heard of – Florida Gulf Shores. They wear it with pride and grace. We enjoy the game, though our bracket suffers.  Harvard also wins a shocker and is fun to watch though we may have gone to school somewhere else and picked New Mexico to go to the final four.

          Life is like our brackets. It often takes turns that we never expected.  The person in our class voted most likely to succeed sometimes doesn’t do very well. You go to a high school reunion and learn that the star athlete is now a fat guy, the boy voted wittiest isn’t very funny anymore, and some of your friends have strange political views. You also learn that the girl that was kind of nerdy in high school is really bright and leads and interesting life. Our lives, like our brackets, also go directions that we did not expect.  Most of our original dreams don’t happen. Most of us don’t play center field for the Yankees.  But we soon learn that there are better dreams that we would have never imagined before. That is why they play the games.

         

 

Clarkson