I Truly Feel Bad For Today's Generation Who Missed Out On The Two Single Greatest March Feelings In The World

Ever since I started working for Barstool 7 years ago I've had the same Selection Sunday routine. Watch the games during the day, blog the selection show, start setting stuff up for the week, spend about an hour looking at the bracket and trying to figure out what I like. Then I take a break, zone out while watching some mindless TV and my mind wanders. Mostly because there's nothing else to do. We have this weird gap when we get the bracket until games start.

That's when it hit me last night. I started thinking about how I need to try and print out a bracket so I can have one and how difficult it is to print out a bracket in 2023. It shouldn't be hard but everything is online. I also know that everyone thinks the era they grew up in is the best, but I can confirm we grew up in the best era, especially for March for two main reasons.

1. The Printed Bracket.

There's nothing like it. You have your bracket, you hold onto that bad boy like it's precious cargo. Shit, I treated my bracket with more respect than a fake ID in college. Another generic looking guy with brown hair and brown eyes? Easy to find. Replacing the bracket? Impossible. 

Not only the bracket. You had two specific pens to go along with the bracket. The sharpie/pen to eliminate teams who lost that you had advancing and the highlighter for wins. If you didn't do it that way, you were the crazy person. Not only that every person I knew did it the same way. Black pen/sharpie for eliminations, yellow highlighter for advancing. 

2. The rollout TV in the class

There's no shot kids today know this look: 

You saw that bad boy coming in, you knew you could put everything away. That teacher just wanted to watch basketball and didn't have a vacation day to take. You also knew exactly what teacher you could count on to have it. Shout out Mrs. Warner and Mr. Sosa. Could always roll into their class room at any time and watch the games. Now every class room has TVs mounted on the wall. Shit, kids probably have laptops and can watch their phones. They didn't have to sneak around to catch Creighton beating Florida in the 5/12 game back in 2002. You saw this moment live

John Biever. Getty Images.

And it's not like I'm talking about something new with this TV cart. Everyone who is my age knows it and still talks about in high regard. But the printed bracket. That's the piece that I feel bad for. Kids these days not knowing what it's like to hear the printer sound waiting for it to come out and then getting your lucky pen to fill it out.

The answer is 5 by the way. As a lefty that's the only one that didn't bleed all over my hand. We had it rough growing up. No left handed scissors, pens bleeding all over us, trapper keepers making it impossible to write because it was only made for righties. Brutal. So here's a plea. Bring back printed brackets. We need to make that a thing.