This is an exciting week. (Or so I’m telling myself as a means of coping with no longer being on Spring Break.) Yet another holiday on Wednesday, one devoted, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, to wearing green and drinking and possibly talking in an Irish accent; two of my friends turn 21 this week; and March Madness, the best part of basketball season, starts Thursday.

I’m more of a football fan, generally, but ever since ninth grade geometry, I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for the NCAA tournament. My teacher was also the high school football coach, and our class was during the lunch period, so during the tournament, some of the cute, older football players would come in to watch the games, and we would all pretend to be doing homework but would actually be staring at the TV (and the football players). Good times.

While a lot of my friends take the tournament with as much seriousness as they take studying for the MCATs and will literally argue for half an hour about teams, players, strategies and whatever it is they argue about (I almost never understand — my eyes start glazing over, similar to what happens when I listen to my roommate study for BCMB), I like March Madness because it’s exciting and riles everyone up. It makes them crazy, if you will. (Get it? Madness?)

I don’t keep up with basketball much and know next to nothing about relative team strengths, but I don’t want to be left out of the fun: To solve this problem, I’ve evolved a rather creative and incredibly subjective method of filling out my bracket in the spring that I thought I’d share with you. (Though if you take this super-seriously, you might want to skip the rest of this column. Quite frankly, half the fun of March Madness for me is watching my basketball-crazy friends’ frustration with my bracket choices.) If anyone is still with me, here goes:

To begin with, Memphis is always in the championship game. And wins. This year, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. Cry a little, to be sure, but probably Tennessee will replace Memphis as my winner. I’m not sure, though, because I haven’t finished my bracket yet.

SEC teams usually win out for several games, especially in the beginning, like with Vandy v. Murray State or Florida v. BYU. But there is a critical exception: Kentucky will definitely lose first round, by a lot, because of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

Next comes schools my friends go to: Purdue, Syracuse, Cal, Pitt and Cornell will all do quite well. I’ll also take Wake Forest over Texas, Wofford over Wisconsin — you get the idea.

Then I proceed to schools with fun names, like Marquette, Gonzaga, Xavier and Baylor, and schools with which I have random associations. I’ll choose St. Mary’s over Richmond because, even though a friend graduated from Richmond, St. Mary’s is the name of an all-girls school in Memphis, and it amuses me to no end to make jokes like, “St. Mary’s is in the basketball tournament? Why are they letting high school girls in the men’s college tournament? Aren’t they rather small compared to the rest of the teams?” (I didn’t say I made good jokes about it.) I’ll take Michigan State over New Mexico State because my high school mascot was the Spartans; they’ll probably go far in my bracket this year because there’s no one else interesting to me in the upper portion of the Midwest bracket.

I’m sure you get the picture by now: Fun and personal amusement are the lamps by which my feet are guided in this particular instance, and I’ve never once regretted that decision. I hope you enjoy March Madness this year as much as I do.

Have fun filling out your brackets, and don’t forget to wear green tomorrow.

(Happy birthday to Ben and happy almost-birthday to Will — hope both of you are reading this!)

— Leigh Dickey is a junior in global studies. She can be reached at [email protected].