BATON ROUGE, La. — The Pete Maravich Assembly Center has spent 50 years seeing commencements and concerts, presidential power and a governor’s prayer rally.
It was not until this past weekend, though, that it came within about five minutes of hosting the second-biggest upset in the history of the N.C.A.A. women’s basketball tournament.
Then the No. 3 seed Louisiana State surged, 14th-seeded Jackson State sputtered and the tournament, long derided as something of a predictable spectacle, went on apace. But the Southern drama — and the theatrics that emerged elsewhere, in places like Iowa City and College Park, Md.