Ah, March. The return of baseball, the coming of Spring, the nuisance that is Daylight Savings Time. And the annual return of the Hoop Flu.

Unlike this particular blogger, who may or may not have been serious about his dislike of March’s college basketball madness, I love this time of year. So much so, that I take time off from being productive at the day job in order to watch as much hoops as I can. And now that the NCAA tournament televises every game on four different networks, it’s a no-brainer for me to do this. Besides, it’s my time; I earned it; and I go. And everyone at work knows this and it isn’t something that they get upset about. And as the years went on, I started to call this mini-vacation/basketball bacchanalia the Hoop Flu.

This all started years ago, when I was a newbie government…