March Madness

In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a seer warns Julius to beware the Ides of March. On his way to the Theatre Pompey, Caesar sees the same seer and calls jokingly to him, "see the Ides of March has come."

"Aye, but not gone," the seer whispers back to him as Julius strides to his death at the hands of the "Liberators," a group of senators who stabbed him to death in an act of "tyrannicide."

The Ides of March has truly come and gone in 2008, but we are in the middle of an annual American ritual where the warning to "beware" is particularly relevant. That's right, we are at the halfway point of the NCAA men's basketball tournament, better known as March Madness. This is a time when even marginally interested basketball fans live up to the full expression of the abbreviated nickname "fan" and become ... fanatics.

This particular tournament seems to deliver the "madness" each and every year as a David or two slays a Goliath or three. Just this year, San Diego toppled mighty Connecticut; West Virginia dispatched perennial power Duke--after Belmont, still fairly new to this Division I game missed a last second shot that would have knocked the Dukies out in the first round; and Davidson, led by a sophomore guard, Stephen Curry, who looks all of 16 years of age, stunned behemoth Georgetown.



So a note of simple caution to colossal Kansas, unbeatable UCLA, notorious North Carolina, mammoth Memphis, terrifying Texas, and any other "favorites" still playing in the tournament: beware March Madness. It has come. But it has not gone.

Who knows what liberators are out and about with tyrannicide on their minds?