I won the first bracket pool I ever entered.
That isn’t meant as a. statement: if anything, it is the perfect example of the frivolity of predicting March Madness. I was eight or nine years old at the time and by no means yet a college basketball addict. I have no idea who I picked, with only a faint memory of selecting upsets based solely off of the records of the teams (as this was the only info provided on the old-school, pen and paper bracket). Yet, I won the pool consisting of dozens of adults in my Dad’s office, and at that young age, the couple hundred dollars the victory brought me seemed like a windfall that would never be matched again in human history.