I dreamed last night that I turned on the TV and saw, to my surprise, that the men’s basketball national championship game was happening — between a major-conference team (I think Villanova?) and, shockingly, the Lafayette Leopards, out of the Patriot League.
Lafayette’s stunning participation aside, I was surprised to see a title game happening at all, because, even in the dream’s version of history, March Madness had been cancelled due to coronavirus — though not beforehand, but midway through the second round. However, now it seemed the NCAA had decided to just pick two random teams from either side of the bracket, and have them play for the championship.
And, mysteriously, one of those teams was a #14 seed, mighty Lafayette College*, which had upset Duke in the first round. Because of course they had. Even my subconscious wants Duke to lose in the first round. 🤣
(*Or, possibly, it might’ve been UL-Lafayette, the Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns. I’m not 100% sure. But I think it was Patriot League Lafayette, not Sun Belt Lafayette.)
Incidentally, I have no idea why my subconscious chose Lafayette for this role. While I would obviously cheer like hell for the Leopards in a hypothetical national title game against a major-conference team, I have no specific rooting interest in Lafayette. Nor were they on my mind in 2019-20: they went 19-12 overall, 10-8 in conference, earned a #5 seed in the Pat League tourney, and got ousted in the semis by Colgate. None of which I knew; I had to look it up. (Colgate, in turn, lost the conference title game to Boston University, making BU the very last team to earn an auto bid before all the cancellations started. That, I did know.)
If I was going to dream about a (non-Gonzaga) mid-major playing for the championship, you might think my brain would’ve picked a team that I specifically follow or root for, like Denver or UNC, or even a more tangential rooting interest like Utah State or Belmont or VCU. Or, hell, I could dream Butler back into the Horizon League, then re-run the Hayward shot yet again. 😂 Alternatively, you might think I would dream about a mid-major that was especially good in 2019-20, like ETSU or Hofstra or SDSU or, above all, Dayton. Poor, poor Dayton. 🙁
But no, my brain picked Lafayette, for whatever reason. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Who knows why. Brains are weird. (TripleDent Gum will make you smile.)
What’s more, Lafayette wasn’t just playing, they were winning in the final minutes of my dream’s bizarro championship game. Seeing that, I suddenly realized that I’d better update the #GiantBracket. Apparently, when the dream-tournament got cancelled in the middle of the second round, I had put the bracket away without writing in the last few pre-cancellation winners. But now I wanted it to be complete and accurate, in preparation for a potential ALL CAPS bracket entry about a mid-major triumph.
I felt a bit torn, though, about how big I would make a possible celebratory “LAFAYETTE!!!!!” on the bracket. I’ve long assumed that a mid-major championship would be the only thing that could ever rival UMBC for all-time, gonna-need-a-bigger-bracket hugeness on the #GiantBracket. But now, even in a dream, it felt a little cheap that the Mid-Majority’s ultimate victory would finally happen in this bizarre situation where a fairly random Cinderella had, for reasons I couldn’t quite place, somehow been plucked out of an incomplete bracket and advanced into the title game without having fully earned it.
Alas, in the very process of pondering that dilemma, the dream started to collapse. (BWAAAAA.) As I tried to backfill the bracket during the under-4 timeout, adding in those second-round results that I’d missed, my dream’s premise — that the tournament had been cancelled mid-second round — started to mentally collide with a vague notion that “wait…I feel like that’s not quite right.”
As I tried to remember whether Lafayette had even played its second-round game, or whether their first-round win over Duke was the only game they’d finished (prior to being airlifted into the championship game weeks later), I started doubting the dream’s reality.
The last thing I remember thinking was, “Hang on…what even is this bracket…did the NCAA even release a bracket?! I thought…”
And then I woke up.
Oh, well.
Go Leopards.
(Photo by Ray Curren, showing Golden Bally at Lafayette’s Kirby Center.)