I'm Watching This Duke Game Now, But I haven't Watched Almost Any of the Tournament

Except for Thursday.

Thursday I watched nearly the entire slate of games. But I missed all but about three minutes of the Syracuse game and the last minute of the Marquette game yesterday, and until I just got home tonight I hadn't seen a second of the games today. And the amazing thing is you can actually escape it.

Let me clarify something though. It's not that I didn't want to watch the games. If I wasn't working for the last 48 hours, I would have been parked on the couch with the TV on CBS all day and all night watching March Madness. I love the tournament, and always have, even if the teams I picked or the teams I root for don't win.

But having been completely removed from it, all I know about the last two days are the scores. And I didn't even know the scores from today's games until half an hour ago. It's a strange feeling, but I actually didn't know what was going on. Actually, I had no idea.

Prior to this experience, I thought the NCAA tournament was an event so large that even if you're not watching you somehow know what's going on. You'll overhear the scores at work, you'll walk into a restaurant to pick up some lunch and the games are on TV and you find out then. Somehow I managed to miss all this yesterday.

And I was working in sports.

Amazing, isn't it?

I realized that there are no sporting events so great that they're inescapable. Even the Super Bowl can be completely missed, because if you're working in an office without media at your disposal, how would you know?

For the first time I entered the bizarro world during one of the biggest sporting events of the year. I was in a world where I had no idea what was going on.

While I love the work I do, I'm not a fan of being kept out of the loop during the NCAA Tournament. It's a feeling I'd rather not have to experience in the future. It only comes once a year.