So my brackets are done. First the four foundational brackets, representing the four bracket humors of love (heart), hate (spleen), analysis (brain), and luck (rectum), as summarized:
Love - National Champ - Virginia
Other Final Four - VCU, San Diego St., Wichita St.
Sweet 16 Cinderellas - Dayton, St. Joe's, Tennessee
First Round Upsets - Western Michigan, North Dakota St., Wofford
Hate - National Champ - Duke
Other Final Four - Florida, Michigan St., Arizona
Sweet 16 Cinderellas - Stanford, Memphis, Kansas St., NC State
First Round Upsets - Stephen F. Austin, Harvard, New Mexico St.
Analysis - National Champ - Arizona
Other Final Four - Florida, Virginia, Louisville
Sweet 16 Cinderellas - none
First Round Upsets - BYU, Tennessee
Monkey Poo - National Champ - Tennessee
Other Final Four - Florida, Iowa St., Oklahoma
Sweet 16 Cinderellas - New Mexico, UConn
First Round Upsets - Dayton, Xavier, Mercer
From here I then made 4 impromptu custom blends to submit to 4 online contests. A Love blend with prominent analysis aroma to ESPN; a spicy Hate/Monkey Poo mixture to Capital One; a bipolar combination of Love and Hate to CBS; and an predominantly analysis blend with just a soupcon of hate to the Washington Post.
All these of course were meant to be merely palate cleansers for the Perfect Bracket, the harmonious coalescence of Love, Hate, Analysis, and Monkey Poo in just the right proportions as to predict accurately all 63 games of the actual bracket, hence winning me $1,000,000,000 in the Warren Buffett/Yahoo/Quicken Loans Challenge. That was the plan, at least, until I had an epiphany yesterday in the Westminster branch of the Carroll County Public Library. What if I had it backwards? What if my job was not to predict, but to proclaim? All the stat heads of the world keep telling us the odds of picking a perfect bracket are, if not astronomical, at least downright discouraging. A recipe for failure. But what if a perfect bracket is not an accurate prognostication, but rather a statement of ideals, a Tom Joad's speech, a vision of how things should be, so clear, so powerful as to call itself into being. That's the bracket I would make. And if it turned out to be imperfect, to fail at predicting reality, well that was reality's fault, not mine. And given the recent report detailing observation of gravitational waves in the background cosmic radiation consistent with inflationary theories of immediate post-Big-Bang universe expansion, which itself is consistent with the possibility of multiverses, then perhaps somewhere out there, is a universe where my perfect bracket predicts and proclaims. And another universe where your bracket is perfect. Good luck collecting that money from alternate universe Warren Buffett, though.
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