My Two Cents: Selection Sunday Just Might Hurt the Most

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Christmas sets the bar for sheer excitement the minute your eyes open in the morning, either as a kid or later in life when you have kids of your own. Nothing can touch it.

Some days come close but, dare I say, from a social distance. Saturday morning of that first big college football game of the year certainly makes the list, as does the first day of my annual family golf trip to Mississippi or that morning of a nice, well-planned date night.

For me, though, firmly locked in at No. 2 is Selection Sunday. It's always right up there, especially when you have a dog in the hunt. It's a rite of passage at Indiana, where every player who has spent four years at Indiana has played in the tournament since 1972.

Today though, will be completely different. The field of 68 has been canceled by COVID-19. There will be no Selection Sunday show, no printing out brackets, no spending the night figuring out which No. 13 seed can be a 4.

What hurts the most?

No Hoosiers.

In Archie Miller's third season in Bloomington, it looked like Indiana had finally done enough to go dancing. That would have been a big deal a little after 6 p.m. when a group of kids and their coaches could have roared when INDIANA popped up on the screen.

That won't happen now, and it's especially painful for Indiana seniors Devonte Green and De'Ron Davis, who set goals to play in the NCAA tournament this year and thought they had achieved that goal. Instead, they'll be the first IU players since Joby Wright and Rick Ford in 1972 to play basketball at Indiana for four years and not play in an NCAA tournament game.

What makes Selection Sunday the most fun, of course, is getting the answer on the whether you're in our out. Most years that doesn't matter — I'd love to see Indiana get back to those days, where playing in the event is a given — so the next thing is WHERE you're playing. I was rooting against Albany, N.Y., and Spokane, Wash., this year and really liked a bracket from my pal Andy Katz where the Hoosiers were playing former disgraced Indiana coach Kelvin Sampson and his Houston team in St. Louis.

That would have been internet gold for a few days, and St. Louis is an easy ride. After publishing and promoting a basketball book in Missouri last year, I could make that drive in my sleep.

Selection Sunday pops the cork on a month of fun. There's nothing better than breaking down that first-round opponent and looking at the eventual path to the Final Four. Indiana fans haven't been able to do that for four years with their own team, but that's the joy of March Madness.

Even if your team isn't in, you're still doing a bracket. You're still taking on your friends in a bracket challenge, and still losing the family challenge to your teenage daughter, who picked all her winners based on how cute the animal mascots were.

But now, we're in a different world, a coronavirus world where we can't even laugh at Corona beer commercials anymore. We can't see that Indiana-Houston pairing come true, can't whine about the Cougars being a 2-point favorite, can't worry how Indiana was going to cover all those three-point shooters, can't help but peak ahead and wonder why the hell Creighton, of all people, was a No. 2 seed. We liked that path.

Those were two wins, right? Glass half-full, right? Going to the regional — in New York City!

Oh, well. None of that is going to happen to now. But we will survive. We've had bad Christmases before, too. Life will go on after this coronavirus pandemic, hopefully for all of us and EVERYONE we know.

We'll get by without basketball. We just don't have to like it.

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