The Madness starts in my head

For the first time in their history, Wagner won the Northeast Conference tournament. That's right, the Power Painters are going to the Big Dance.

Most fans probably haven't heard of the NEC. The tournament is one of the milestones of the college basketball season though. It marks the start of March Madness. Like the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, it's not significant for what it is, but for what it begins.

Fans probably haven't heard of the mighty Power Painters of Wagner University either. That's because the team name is entirely made up. Confession time: I've never actually seen a NEC game. I just monitor the scores during halftime of Carolina-Duke that first weekend in March. St. Francis beat Farleigh Dickenson. Rider leads LIU at the half. Marist is up by two over St. Francis (How can you not love a conference that contains two St. Francii?)

The NEC is like the old ACC tournament -- only the winner is going to the NCAA's. So teams save plays all season and unveil them during the tournament. It seems like every year, the number one seed would lose in the first round, to a team with a ridiculous 3-22 record. I've seen poor seasons, but 3-22 is Athletes in Action bad.

The games are always packed with action, because, like everything else about the tournament, the details exist only in my mind. The league has the best team names in the country. The St. Francis in Pennsylvania got custody of the "Runnin' Assissis." New York's St. Francis was, of course, the "Albert Sinatras." I even made up a conference slogan, "The Northeast Conference-We've got NECst!" The players of UMBC are the "Good Scrabble Draws" and LIU goes by "In/Of." Get it? In LIU Of.

I still often reminisce about NEC games I never watched. There was the epic game in the early 1990s, when the Fightin' Rental Trucks of Rider held off a plucky Power Painters squad. Then there was the year that the NEC had it's own version of the Civil War. There can be no winners when Francis battles Francis.

Then came that fatal Championship Week, where I tuned in for the conference title game on ESPN, and the wizard came out from behind the curtain. The mini-ACC tournament I'd seen in my mind was, in fact, about 200 fans packed into a glorified high school gym. I learned Marist's nickname, and it was funnier than anything I'd imagined for them. The Red Foxes? I imagined their pep band belting out a fight song that sounded suspiciously like the theme from Sanford and Son. They left the conference soon after, as did Rider, and things were never the same again.

But that's okay. I have a new favorite conference: The Mid-Continent, which sounds like an ailment whose cures are advertised in vague commercials. This year's champion is something called IUPUI. Isn't that the name of the Montreal Expos' mascot?