From miracles to March madness

SACRAMENTO, California—After the Super Bowl, sports fans in the United States, including legions of Filipinos, know the drill.
Scarred by the thought of not seeing great quarterbacks Eli Manning and Tom Brady throw blazing passes for a while and after helping the term “Tebowing” go viral, sports fans must go into a period of adjustment.
With the National Football League having crowned Manning and the New York Giants champions, weekend sports warriors will have time to recharge before resuming their reign over the television remote.
Their next juggling act will be crucial. They will have to divide their attention between the ongoing National Basketball Association games and the unofficial beginning of the college basketball season marked by the end of pro football’s run.
“Tebowing,” falling on one knee in prayer, was part of Philippine-born Denver quarterback Tim Tebow’s public display of his Christianity, each time he led the Broncos to a miraculous win. It was a national phenomenon during the NFL wars.
Diehards expect to witness more water turning into wine stuff now that Kobe Bryant, Dwayne Wade and LeBron James and other spellbinding acts in the NBA—where amazing happens—have the floor. The superstars will be in the unblinking eyes of TV cameras until March Madness takes over the airwaves.
The men’s Division I national college basketball tournament, aka March Madness—America’s version of our UAAP, NCAA and the alphabet soup of leagues in the islands rolled into one—is about close games and major surprises. It is where the Goliaths such as Duke, Kentucky, Kansas, Louisville and Connecticut are confronted and sometimes dwarfed by the Davids like Butler, George Mason and Virginia Commonwealth on the road to the Final Four.
During the Madness, the idea of a dynasty, a la an Ateneo five-peat is not workable. The last team to dominate was John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins, who were champs from 1967 through 1973.
Last year’s Final Four was only the third semifinal in Madness history without a single No. 1 seed since the ranking system began 33 years ago.
Third seed Connecticut went on to beat Butler, the Cinderella team in the Big Dance, 53-41. Butler, not even in the top 25 teams last year, was also in the Finals two seasons ago, only to be edged out by Duke, 51-49, in the championship game.
The Madness is so unpredictable, that even the Hoopster-in-Chief, President Barack Obama has not been on target since his annual Final Four picks turned into a media feeding frenzy three years ago.
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Dorothy Ysmael, among the grand old ladies of Cuyapo, Nueva Ecija, has died. She was 104 years old, among the few in the world to have reached that age before returning to the Creator.
Mrs. Ysmael was preceded in death by her husband, retired United States Army lieutenant and former Cuyapo councilor Bartolome Ysmael. The couple belonged to a regal and splendidly charming family known for social work and philantrophy. Its environmental stewardship lives on with a preserve and mini-forest in Cuyapo’s Barangay Malineng established in Mr. Ysmael’s name by a daughter, Gloria Adams of Seattle, Washington.