One of my favorite days of the year as a child was that certain Monday in March, the day after the NCAA Tournament brackets were released and the Madness was about to being. USA Today would have a special insert approximately the size of a Manhattan yellow pages, and this would be my Bible for the next three weeks.
(If you didn’t understand any of the references in the previous sentence you can Google them.)
(Actually don’t. Just skip the rest of this post. It’s not for you.)
This was the only day of the year my Dad would buy USA Today. He’d arrive home with it, holding like a trophy or perhaps some sacred text. Contained within were the secrets that would allow us, mere mortals, to enter the world of sophisticated college basketball analysis and reveal for us the roadmap to predicting a perfect bracket, long before Warren Buffet and company got involved. These were the days of the “office pool,” and no one put more thought and energy and careful consideration into his picks than 8-year-old Mikey O’Connell. I gave the process the solemn respect owed to peace treaties and human rights declarations. This was serious business.
Years later the obsession lessened, especially after crossing that embarrassing point where the players were younger than I was.
But I always filled out a bracket. And I always bought a copy of USA Today.
Until this year.
I always knew this day would come, as every year it became more and more difficult to find a place that actually sold newspapers, let alone USA Today.
My last holdout was the Shell gas station in Lansdowne, Va., eight miles up the road from my house but worth the journey, a sort of last picture show of print media.
And then, one day, it was gone.
Oh, the Shell station is still there. They sell gas and cell phone chargers and vitamin waters and other 21st century products.
But not a single newspaper.
The Harris Teeter in the plaza sold newspapers but no USA Today, and even though it was a longshot I stopped in a Starbucks too. Yeah, they used to sell newspapers but not any more.
Like so many things in life it was just, not any more.
A one-second Internet search of college basketball reveals a thousand times the information contained in the world’s largest copy of USA Today or any newspaper.
It wasn’t hard for me, of course, to find game times, team descriptions, player stats, etc.
But holding that copy of USA Today?
For the first time in 35 years, it was not meant to be.
Yeah, I’m sure I could have ordered one from Timbuktu or wherever they print the six copies they no doubt make these days, but it just wouldn’t be the same.
My son and I paused for a moment in that gas station parking lot, mourning the lost of, well, a childhood friend.
A childhood, actually.
Like all things, you know it won’t last forever.
But you never expect it to be today.
USA Today was now yesterday.
But March Madness, marches on.