It’s official. The updated ratings came out yesterday and I am the absolute bottom in the office basketball brackets pool. Number 40 out of 40. Even a dead dog came out ahead of me. (Our pool allows pets of employees to enter and the pets are not verified, apparently even to see if they are alive.)

Only the top three get any prizes and the first also gets bragging rights for the year. It occurred to me that the only two that will be remembered are the first and the last. I will have anti-bragging rights for a year. And if I am to be remembered for being the worst, I’d rather have it be in an office pool than something important such as performance evaluations at work or ranking at school, or something embarrassing such as being the worst at gym in high school. I was so bad that I was not just the last one to be chosen for a team, I was the one they lent to the other team if they were short on players.

I really have no incentive to improve my score by starting to follow college basketball. I was a team player by entering and I am sure that Number 39 is very glad I entered.

Besides, learning more about basketball would take time away from investigating if I can fit a visit to Valapaiso, Indiana into one of my regular trips to the Hoosier State, hopefully during the popcorn festival.

In Noel Streatfeild’s Skating Shoes, Lalla, a young skater, is supposed to be practicing her brackets on the ice, and becomes angry when her friend and fellow-skater Harriet reminds her. Hearing their argument, and learning that it was about brackets, Nana, Lalla’s nurse, finds it hard to intervene. “Whenever that word was used Nana saw in her mind’s eye some brackets that had been in her home when she was a little girl. They had been made of wood, covered in a pinkish plush, and on each bracket stood photographs of her relatives.”

This week I learned that I know as little about brackets as Nana did when I entered the office March Madness Pool. Knowing virtually nothing about college basketball, I chose my teams using the following rules: 1) If I had ever seen the team play I picked that team. The only college men’s basketball game I have ever attended was a Butler home game, so I picked Butler as the winner of it all. Butler lost last night. 2) If I had never heard of a school I picked them to lose. Valparaiso University didn’t stand a chance. 3) If I had any association with a school either as a student or an employee, I picked them if the association was positive, and chose them to lose if the association was negative. I worked at Harvard for fourteen months and hated it so I chose them to lose. They won in the first round. 4) The last criteria was if I thought I would like to visit the state or city. I’d like to visit Oregon so I picked them.

My brackets have fallen off the wall leaving large holes in the plaster. I have since learned that 1) the numbers next to a team on the bracket chart are not random; they represent the college’s ranking. Who knew? Apparently everyone but me 2) the winning team is the team that wins the game, not the team that wins an election based on popularity.

But I’m not sure I would necessarily change my brackets now that I know more about the way it works. After all the “upsets” I have heard about on the news, maybe there is still hope for a few of my likable states or cities. It was only five dollars to enter and I doubt I would have done better by buying tickets for last night’s Powerball drawing even though the winning ticket was sold in New Jersey. However, I have since learned that Valparaiso, Indiana, was where Orville Redenbacher developed his popcorn, and the town has a popcorn festival each year. I would probably choose them next year. After all, how can you vote against a place that has an Orville Redenbacher monument?