Columbia blues during March Madness

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty darn happy to be a student here at Columbia. Great education, great city, great people. But as a sports fan, March can be the toughest month to bleed light blue. Year after year, the onset of spring carries with it certain doubts about the awesomeness of my soon-to-be alma mater.

Columbia freshmen who grew up on a healthy diet of SportsCenter and College GameDay know what they’re in for. It’s not really a place for tailgating or face painting or season-ticket lotteries. Our marching band is a well-meaning joke, our high-profile varsity teams are average, but it’s all good because no one around campus really seems to care and because some of the great things about Columbia go a long way toward offsetting this unfortunate apathy. Still, some of my classmates have never heard of Baker Field, others don’t know how to find Levien.

For those of us who do know the difference between Dodge Hall and Dodge Fitness Center, small tinges of admissions regret inevitably taint the month of March. The Columbia football season covers us from September through Thanksgiving, at which point it’s replaced seamlessly by basketball. Say what you will about the success of these teams, but they’re fun to watch. Their league records may hover around .500, and they’re probably not winning any Ivy titles in the near future, but they often make things interesting against top teams and leave plenty of room for analysis and discussion.

Since a thrilling end to the basketball season in early March—including a loss to Yale in double overtime and a season-ending blowout win over Brown—there hasn’t been much to get excited about. I’m glad the baseball season is underway, and I’m even happier that we’ve got a pretty solid team, but realistically I’m not going to pay too much attention until the Ivy League opener on April 2. I mean seriously, how can I calculate ERA and talk about stolen bases while there’s still snow on the ground? So, for those 27 intermediary days, all I’ve really got is March Madness.

It’s tough. Now don’t get me wrong, the NCAA Tournament is the best event in college sports. The hard part is recognizing how exciting it is while not getting too depressed that we go to a school that never competes in it. It’s nice that the Ivies get to send a representative, but with Princeton sent packing after the first round I’m really just a college student watching college sports that have absolutely nothing to do with the college I attend.

I want to know what it’s like to go to a Final Four school. I want to know what it’s like to go to a school where all my best friends know all about the basketball team, where everyone knows the athletes by face, where my college is featured on prime time on ESPN. School spirit is a big part of college, and we really don’t have any of it.

So March Madness, the only real solace I can find in this lengthy stretch between February and April, is not all fun and games for a Columbia sports fan. It’s also a nasty little reminder that our education may be elite and our home city may be America’s greatest campus, but our college experience is not typical and is not everything it could be.

Even professional sports don’t provide much of a refuge during the interminable month of March. Football is obviously out of season and spring training is kind of meaningless. Thank goodness the NBA and NHL playoff races are so incredibly competitive and exciting this year.

I guess there’s only one way out of this quandary. Clearly, March wouldn’t be so depressing if our basketball team would just win the league, make the damn tournament, and hang in there for a few rounds. Then people would have to start caring, right? Wait—maybe it’s better that we never make it. It means we won’t have to find out the answer to that question.