Madness? No- The Way Life Should Be!

By Ryan McGowan

It was like the Perfect Storm of scheduling, a windfall in which a succession of circumstances produced possibly the greatest weekend of hedonism of all time.  It was a blur of memories of vague colors, with Kelly green mingling endlessly with Carolina blue, Wolfpack red, and Golden Knights… well, gold.  Was that the Vermont Catamounts on TV, or did I just order another Guinness?  In moments like this past weekend, it was at times impossible to tell.In short, the very fact that St. Patrick’s Day, the first two days of the NCAA tournament, a free buffet event at The Place in downtown Boston, and a gratuitous Friday off for me all coincided this year is enough to reaffirm my belief in God, and to confirm that He loves us and wants us to be happy, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin.  Or did he say, “Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder?”  Maybe it was “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”  I can’t remember at this point; I’m just trying to piece together the events of the last few days in enough detail to write something vaguely coherent.

I am actually relieved that March Madness/St. Patty’s weekend turned out to be so raucous, because it didn’t have the greatest of starts for me.  I woke up on the morning of St. Patty’s and happened to glance at the syllabus for my Thursday night grad school class, and noticed that I had conveniently overlooked a paper that I was supposed to write, make copies for people in my group, and defend at class tonight.  One of those kick-me-in-the-balls moments in life.   I was supposed to be done with work by noon, kick back and an endless array of games, take an annoyance of a break from 4:30-6:30 for class, and then continue the process at some bar with an assembly line of Guinness draughts in front of me. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be, as I was forced to spend my afternoon typing away in the library and making copies at Kinko’s, rather than bemoaning my bracket being busted from the start when Pacific throttled Pittsburgh, who I had going to the Sweet 16.

St. Patrick’s Night got off to a dubious start as well.  I am working on this group project with four other people in one of my classes, who are from a diverse assortment of places such as Angola, Belize, and Jamaica.  Needless to say, none of them are named Sully, Murph, or Fitzy, and they have little to no sense of St. Patrick’s Day decorum, which to a McGowan is an unfortunate cultural casualty.  After class, they decided it would be a good time to have a two-hour group meeting and go over our project.  I successfully navigated that annoyance, however, and ended up out at the Office (a strangely named bar, as you would think after a long day in a cubicle, that’s the last place you want to go after work), where I realized that St. Patrick’s Day is maybe the only day of the year in which it is socially acceptable to go out right after work, crash at your buddy’s place that night, and then go to work the next morning wearing a set of his clothes because you are still too drunk to drive yourself home to get dressed.  Not that this happened to my roommate Scott’s work friend Seth or anything, I am just saying, maybe it could happen.

Determined to catch up after a disappointing start to the weekend, I hit the Place around 12:30 on Friday afternoon, ready to watch the NC State Wolfpack in action (my former hometown team from my brief stint living in Raleigh), drink some beers, and take advantage of the free buffet, no-meat-on-Fridays Catholicism be damned.  I am sure God is a big fan of the free buffet, and would forgive anyone who was simply taking advantage of one of the best days of the year.  I felt like I was in Vegas all over again, complete with girls coming around propositioning me.  Only this time it wasn’t some hooker named Felicia asking me if I needed a friend tonight, it was scantily-clad girls asking if I needed another tall Bud Lite. For their sake, I hope the waitresses had a lot more success than the seemingly STD-filled skank that was roaming around my hotel in Vegas last week.

I haven’t been drinking much lately because of doctor’s orders (long story), so my tolerance and game were way off on Friday.  Maybe I should have pulled a Curt Schilling and taken my comeback slowly, not wanting to overdo it on the first day back and be out of commission for the Opening Day party.  Either way, I went at it like a champ, which resulted in me passing out at my girlfriend Jen’s apartment and only waking up when my brother called me to ask if I saw the end of the UVM-Syracuse game.  He was all excited because he took a liking to UVM after having played against T.J. Sorrentine in high school.  (For the record, Sorrentine’s postgame press conference would have been ten times funnier if they had let his dad, a kind of eccentric lookalike of Doctor Emmett Brown from “Back to the Future” and also the basketball/baseball coach at Saint Raphael’s in Pawtucket, RI, appear on stage with him.)  So, unfortunately, my binge of 25-ouncers at the Place resulted in me missing the end of the best game of the tournament, but thank God for DVR that I was able to watch it when I got back to my house.

Thankfully, though, I got to see probably the biggest upset of the tournament, when #14 seed Bucknell, winners of the Patriot League tourney after upsetting my alma mater of Holy Cross, somehow knocked off the Kansas Jayhawks, in Oklahoma City, no less.  I never thought I would be rooting for Bucknell, especially with those hideous orange pumpkin uniforms that look like something out of “Austin Powers.”  But sure enough, I figured a win for Bucknell would give some more credibility to the Patriot League, especially after HC’s three incredibly close near-misses in the tournament and a win in the NIT last week over an emotionally nonexistent Notre Dame team.  I was convinced that Wayne Simien, who (along with Julius Hodge) seems to have enrolled in college in the same semester as I did, was going to drain a shot Laettner-style at the buzzer, ending Bucknell’s dreams and making a goat out of the kid who threw the ball away and then got an intentional foul right afterwards.  But, despite the referees’ best intentions of helping the Jayhawks move on, Simien missed the shot, and suddenly the Patriot League was 2-0 in the postseason.  

To top off the weekend, I managed to get tickets to the second round on Sunday, back at my old college stomping grounds of Worcester.  My brother Patrick was excited when I asked him to come because we were going to get to see UVM.  (On a side note, I learned this weekend that “UVM” was an abbreviation for the Latin phrase “Universitas Viridis Montis” meaning “University of the Green Mountains.”  Who said SC.com wasn’t educational?) The place was crawling with UConn fans, but somehow the cheers for Vermont seemed about twice as loud.  I didn’t know so many crunchy lumberjacks could make so much noise.  It seemed like everywhere I looked, all I could see was a sea of white guys with sideburns, beards, unkempt shaggy hair, and hooded sweatshirts with the hoods cut off.  So much for overblown stereotypes.  

Needless to say, I was happy when NC State held on for the upset over the Huskies, after blowing an 11-point lead with about five minutes to play.  If nothing else, it got thousands of UConn fans to go back to their roosts in Danbury, Waterbury, and Whateverbury and opened up seats for a lot more Catamount supporters.

Unfortunately, UVM ran out of legs and was outmuscled by a physically superior Michigan State squad.  It’s too bad; it would have been great to see the spectacle of a team with eleven players (eight or nine of whom are white) whose best player is named the ambiguously-gendered “Taylor” make a splash at the regional final.  If nothing else, it would give the Vermont faithful an excuse to pack up their 1970 VW busses and roadtrip to Austin (“the University of Austin, in Massachusetts?”) which would have been quite the spectacle indeed.  Put a few thousand Green Mountain Boys in Worcester and it’s not a big deal; throw them together in Central Texas and now we have classic red state-blue state comedy.

Anyway, the weekend certainly ended up living up to the hype.  After a slow start, it definitely developed into the Perfect Storm of hedonism that it was originally intended to be.  My only question is, why do they call it “March Madness” when it seems like this is the way life is supposed to be?  Maybe we should take every chance we get to live in an alcohol-induced, mind-altered state of consciousness.  I am sure God wouldn’t mind.  If we learned nothing else this weekend, we found out not only that He likes free buffets, but He is also a big Vermont fan.  You know He was smiling ear-to-ear wearing a hemp necklace and eating maple syrup pancakes when they beat the Cuse.  

On to the Sweet Sixteen…