Why The Fuck Do I Do This To Myself?

My Final Four picks for this men's basketball tournament were Tennessee, Gonzaga, Purdue, and Duke.

Tennessee got pipped by a last-second jump shot by Loyola-Chicago, which is still alive and headed to San Antonio as a true Cinderella, and Godspeed, truly, to them.

Gonzaga got bulldozed by a Florida St. squad that was defensively deficient.  And yet, some time on Wednesday, I had the Seminoles going to the Sweet Sixteen after knocking of Xavier.  But I changed my mind and named Missouri as the one who would do the honors of upsetting the defensively even more deficient Musketeers and advance to the Regional Semifinals instead.  It's one of those 8/9 games which usually don't count in the long run but, because I am in a field with hundreds of people, if I ever were to get in the money, 8/9 matchups, which usually get blitzed in the Round of 32 by the region's #1 seed, will be the difference in, oh, hundreds of dollars.

Purdue was going well until Isaac Haas fractured his elbow.  It's rare that a team's fortune in The Big Dance is dashed due to injury, but once I heard that it was highly unlikely that Haas, the Boilermakers' Center, would be out for the rest of the tourney, I metaphorically pissed my pants.  They survived Butler, their Second Round opponent, but got ganked by Texas Tech in the Regional Semifinal.  (By the way, a tournament where Florida St., Texas Tech and Kansas St. all reached the Elite Eight is a strange tournament indeed.)

And Duke, fuck!  I really wanted to see the 60 Minutes interview with porn star Stormy Daniels, but I didn't want to see the Kansas-Duke Regional Final at all.  But since my parents were ready to eat and I didn't want to miss the beginning of the interview and, well, since the game was getting close, I had to watch.  Well, fuck, I was bad luck because I started watching with the Blue Devils holding a lead and, with a series of turnovers and missed shots, the Jayhawks tied it at the end of regulation and then won the fucking game in Overtime.

With that loss, I am done for the NCAA Tournament.  I failed to pick any team in the Final Four.  And when it was clear that Dook was going to lose, I got up from the dinner table to go to my room and thumb through my clipboard, where I have a couple of my brackets from years past.  I don't remember getting one Final Four team right last year, and I didn't.  I couldn't find 2016, but I'm sure I didn't that year, either.  I had to go back to 2015 where I correctly picked one, and thankfully, that year I actually picked two.

But assuming I didn't get one right in 2016, that means that for the past three years I didn't get any Final Four team.  At all.  That meant I finished way out of the money for the big bracket, where I chip in $20, or the small pool, where I just have to select the Final Four teams, where I chip in $5.  That's $25 for picks that were completely off.  And I've basically thrown $25 down the drain three years in a row.

And once I looked through my clipboard, it hit me: Why the fuck do I do this to myself?  I'm terrible at this!  Sure, I won the small bracket once, but that was, like, 15 years ago.  The feeling I get about this, which I think is contrary to all the other people who play these pools with me, is similar to my contrarian point-of-view when it comes to other forms of gambling.  People just plop in some money for these brackets and go, "What the hell," and if they win money, great, and if they lose money, hey, so what.  I'm not that type of guy.  There is no joy in losing money, period.  And that I haven't even been close to the money the past three years, well ... it makes me reconsider why in the hell am I even playing.  I've been doing this for about two decades now, so maybe I'm feeling this way because I just turned 42, but pissing away money like this has gotten pretty fucking old.

I've been thinking like this for three days now, and I feel just as turned off now as I did once Duke lost.  So I'm seriously wondering if I should even play at all next season.  I mean, why should I torture myself like this again?  It seems like every goddamn year my anticipation for March Madness quickly curdles into "I hate this fucking tournament" once I lose, like, six of my last eight teams over the course of an evening.  That's not fun at all.  And yet it feels as though I've been going through this cycle of masochism a lot, especially the last few years.  If the intent is to actually win one of these fucking pools, maybe I shouldn't toss my money into the sewer like this.

So I wonder if I could, or should, take a one-year sabbatical from The Big Dance.  A year's remove from losing in the NCAA Tournament, and all its intended anxiety and anger, might do me good.  And who knows, maybe that will convince me to make the sabbatical permanent.  At the very least it would save me $25 a year.