Three days from tip-off--unless you actually count Coppin St.- Mt. St. Mary's (and you'd have to more than "mad" to watch that game over Celtics at Rockets Tuesday night)--and let the whining begin. Nobody loves Devin's Duke. Coatney's Jayhawks always disappoint. This is the kind of vintage whine with which you are blessed when your teams are perennial Big Dancers and, even more, contenders. So here's my whine: Being twice as smart as you guys, I have two alma maters. And for the first time in history, or at least my long memory, both of them made it to the Big Dance. So I was really looking forward to having a genuine, as opposed to simply a pool-driven, rooting interest in two of the 32 opening games. And lo and behold, my duo gets matched up in the first round--Stanford, a #3 seed vs. Cornell, a #14. I guess the only consolation is I'm the only one of us absolutely assured of having his alma mater make it to the second round.

As for Kansas, I do feel your pain, Coatney. A team that can't win with Wilt Chamberlain at center is probably snakebitten. (How many women did he sleep with the night before the 1957 NCAA Finals against North Carolina? You think it might have caught up with him by the third overtime?) Duke is the more interesting case and I'm glad Devin brought up the sensitive racial angle. He says the most hated player in college basketball is almost always a Dukie--and usually a white Dukie. I wonder if that is part of a backlash against the tendency of announcers, both white and black, to employ--probably unwittingly--affirmative action in overhyping white stars. Because we now view college and pro basketball as part of a continuum, it's difficult to judge a player as just a collegian. So while Christian Laettner, Bobby Hurley and J.J. Reddick may have deserved all the praise they got as college stars at Duke, our ultimate judgment on them is that they were, at best, serviceable and, at worst, overmatched in the NBA.

Which leads me to this college season's Player of the Year debate:North Carolina's Tyler Hansbrough vs Kansas State's Michael Beasley. If you read the debate and the votes on ESPN.com, the edge seems to go to Hansbrough, the cog in the middle of the number one team in the country. But if "team" was supposed to make the difference, then Greg Oden should have won last year over Kevin Durant. Beasley's numbers are comparable to Hansbrough's, maybe even slightly better, without quite as much talent around him. Our former colleague Jonathan Meltzer wrote me that he was struck by how many of those supporting Hansbrough cited how gritty he was, how hard he played all the time how relentless he was. All true, we agree. But Meltzer noted that these are arguments that almost always get made on behalf of white players.(Think David Eckstein for some crossover sport reference.) The only adjective missing from the white vernacular was "heady." Hansbrough is certainly a worth candidate, may even deserve it, but I think Meltzer has a point about the debate and the bias.

Now that I have all that out of my system, maybe next time we can move onto picks. My daughter called from Cape Town, South Africa this morning for help on her brackets. She's going to be trekking through the Namibian desert for much of the tournament so I asked her, "What's the point?" Stupid question apparently. Doing your brackets no longer appears to be optional. Everybody plays, whether they know anything or care about any of the teams.

Everyone who has graduated from Duke University since 1986—a span of more than 20 years—has something remarkable in common: they have all gotten to witness at least one trip to the Final Four by the men's basketball team before they left campus. Everyone, that is, except members of the class of 1998. My graduating class. I picked the wrong four years—the only wrong four years—to be at Duke in the last quarter-century. My Blue Devils played in the national title game three months before I arrived in the fall of 1994 (we lost to Arkansas), and we made it back the year after I left, in 1999 (we lost to Connecticut; we always lose to Connecticut). In between? Let's see. My freshman year we stank. Coach Mike Krzyzewski hurt his back and left the team in midseason to have surgery, and we missed the NCAA tournament entirely, finishing with a 13-18 record. My sophomore year we lost in the first round. My junior year, the second round. But during my senior year we were a national power again, and we steamrolled all the way to the NCAA tourney's Elite 8, where we ran up a 17-point lead on Kentucky with just over nine minutes to go, putting us a few heartbeats away from total redemption. I was the editor of Duke's daily newspaper at the time, and—in a feat of forehead-slapping hubris that I will regret for the rest of my natural life—I had already laid out the next day's triumphant front page.

I don't remember much about the last nine minutes of that Kentucky game, other than their point guard, Wayne Turner, repeatedly driving through our defense as if we were a bunch of orange cones on the floor. I do remember that I didn't shed a tear as the last few seconds of the last game of my Duke career slipped away, if only because I'd already ripped out my eyeballs and thrown them at the television. I definitely don't remember the final score. It might've been 86-84, Kentucky. But don't ask me. I've blocked it out.

If you've read this far you're probably snickering by now. This is how it is to be a Duke fan: you—all of you—hate us. There's a writer named Will Blythe, a graduate of the University of North Carolina, our sworn enemy, who hates Duke so much that he wrote an entire book about it called "To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever," and it was a best-seller. He spun his bile for a bunch of college students into serious money. And you know what? We get it. We're fine with it. Our pain is your joy. Our tears are your sweet tea. Whenever we lose, an angel gets its wings.

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