The evidence.

Clamoring for March Madness coverage? Of course not. You’re Columbia University, and also our mothers. Well, we have some for you anyway, sure to please everyone from the most diehard bracketheads to those who actually attend this school. A Bwog staffer shares her story of love, loss, and basketball brackets. 

The competition is real right now – we may go to a D1 school, but our fellow athletic divisional compatriots are far more concerned with their men in jerseys making it to the top in everyone’s (or no one’s) brackets and hearts. March Madness is real on college campuses, everywhere but here. We manage with dreaming of winning big in some frat’s bracket pool, but what the hell do we know about basketball?

I, too, once asked myself what I knew about basketball, and the immediate answer was that my ex-boyfriend loved it. He was mad about March, I was mad about him, and he put his energy in basketball to distract from a crumbling relationship. And when the competition of promposals once dominated the social scene, I turned to his obsession with the sociology of March Madness: I put a self-made, hand-written March Madness bracket on his locker, with the Final Four letters as the most overplayed high school event in mankind, P-R-O-M.

It was a production of true genius, especially for someone who only made a (real) bracket to prove I was a “cool” girlfriend. Starting with the Round 0f 32, each line where a team would go would be an inside joke, and the prom bracket followed the actual progression of the March Madness 2013 bracket. If my Final Four were to be PROM, Louisville was P, R was Wichita State, O was Syracuse, and M was Michigan (ironically, the school he’d be attending in the fall). Coming up with an inside joke that began with O was harder than most SAT questions that spring. He said yes, and the accolades I received from his senior friends and the 100+ likes on the mandatory mupload made me feel like I’d truly won the game.

We never made it to prom. Exactly week after the big promposal, we broke up. I busted a nut to act like I care only to get dumped and to never go as a junior to senior prom. Shame. I suppose Michigan doubly lost that night.

I sympathize with the 63 teams that lose during this fateful month, as this godforsaken competition brought my first love life to a quick halt. Winning seemed within reach, but one more week in the ranks proved my losing destiny. Dreams of well-liked instragrams crushed, no dead corsage to hang on my bedroom bulletin board to parallel the fading memories of an over-hyped night. Luckily he has the prom bracket poster board somewhere, or else I’d have too much to show for March Madness ruining my sex life. Or maybe he’s thrown it away by now.