March Madness

This week began March Madness again. It's the NCAA basketball tournament that features non stop basketball games for days in a row. The hard to resist feature for sports fans is that so many of the games are between teams who never faced each other during the year - and that leads to some exciting finishes. This week already several higher seeded teams (12, 13 and even a 14 seed) have beat lower seeded and favored teams. The number one team  in the country, Gonzaga, narrowly avoided losing to the lowly 16th seed, Southern. The other interesting feature of the tournament for sports fans is "bracketology". A fan can fill out his own bracket of the 68 teams in the field and see how his picks do against his friends or even the experts. My own small tournament pool includes one other person, my youngest son. He beats me even though I spend much more time researching the teams and listening to the experts. I do better against the picks of the experts. Experts! It is amazing how little they know. They watch these teams all year long and still get their picks wrong! What do experts know, anyway? We anoint experts in every field and we trust them, why, I do not know. They are usually wrong, about the economy, the weather, the fishing, the odds that someone will succeed or fail in their chosen fields, etc. Life, like basketball games is unpredictable. You never know when your three point shooter will have a day when he can't find the basket, or your assist leader will turn an ankle, or one of your bigs will foul out in the first half, or your normally sure handed ball handlers can't take care of the ball. On the other hand, there are days when your non shooting guard can't miss, and every play the coach diagrams works, and you match up better than you thought and you win by 20 when the experts had you losing by the same number! There is much anxiety and worry expended over what the experts say. If you listen to the experts, some days you might wonder if it's worth playing the game. I think I should listen to experts less and I might enjoy life more.