These guys are killing me.  Notre Dame's men's basketball team took No. 3 UConn into overtime before losing last night.  ND is now 13-11, 4-9 in conference play.  But the killer is they always come so close.  Their last 10 losses have been by an average of 4.3 points.  They've also come close to knocking off several ranked opponents in overtime, but they just can't close.  They may just be the best awful team out there this season.

With the college football season over and the NFL into the playoffs, I recently allowed myself to start thinking ahead to college basketball.  I admit I really don’t get into it until February; following football just consumes too much of my time.  But my mind started to wander as I flipped channels the other night and saw ND lose a heart-breaker to Syracuse, and it got me thinking about the granddaddy of all student athletic traditions at ND, the Bookstore Basketball Tournament. 

For those of you who are not ND alums or aren’t married to one and therefore don’t have to listen to us prattle on about all things Irish, Bookstore is commonly cited as the largest five-on-five, outdoor basketball tournament in the world.  Most of the student body, and a significant number of professors, coaches and university staff, participate.  It’s a classic, single-elimination, five-on-five tournament that rages on the outdoor asphalt courts that dot the ND campus for several weeks each April. 

Some teams are serious, most are not.  In fact, the vast majority of teams are just out there for the hell of it, complete with ridiculous costumes.  My all-time favorite was a team that dressed themselves completely in duct tape.  They looked like silver space-age mummies.  I can only imagine how long it took them to suit up and the pain that ensued when they de-robed.  Another favorite was my friend’s Braveheart-inspired team back in ’97.  They all wore kilts and blue war paint a la Mel Gibson.  Funny thing was, they actually had a couple guys who could play and made it deep into the tournament.  The highlight was that the few guys who couldn’t play would resort to giving a Highland Salute to opposing players as they charged the basket, and true to form, they wore nothing under their kilts.  All teams must have a name and countless hours are wasted trying to come up with clever epithets that will pass the review board.  Give Catholic kids rules and they will undoubtedly uncover a way around them.

After the first three or four rounds, when the joke teams have been eliminated, the real tournament kicks in.  The remaining teams are good, and although they usually consist of a couple of varsity athletes (rules state you can only have one varsity basketball player per team, he/she must have no remaining NCAA eligibility, and no more than three varsity athletes from any other sport), a team of “regular” guys will usually pull a Gonzaga and make a march for glory.  And when that happens, they quickly become the crowd favorite.

How big is Bookstore?  Let me put it this way; they #### stands around the outdoor courts for the semi-finals and finals.  The student paper covers it like it’s the NCAA tournament, famous alumni come back to play in an exhibition game before the final -- I’ll never forget watching Tony Rice play one year; the guy has an amazing vertical – and going to a game is a perfectly acceptable excuse to get out of, well, just about anything. 

But it transcends all that.  Bookstore draws the whole school together in a way only football season can match.  For a few short weeks when northern Indiana is just starting to wake up from its winter nap, we come alive again.  We clear out the cobwebs and get excited about sports and being Notre Dame again.  And it provides countless excuses for blowing off studying for finals a bit longer.

My roommates and I entered the tournament our senior year and it continues to be one of my favorite memories from college.  There is a separate women’s draw and it tends to be quite competitive, but we knew we had no chance of winning anything so we entered the main draw.  We drew a team of freshman guys in the first round.  Now, our average height was about 5’4,” at most.  Four of the five of us had played basketball, an all-star point guard among us, so we weren’t horrible, but we weren’t exactly good either.  In the end we put up a good fight, had a great time and bought the kids a case of beer after the game because they finally figured out what our team nickname meant. (For the record it was “Triple Stuffed Oreo”; we were three white girls, a Mexican-American and a Vietnamese-American.)  Fortunately we had more serious matters to attend to.  My roommate's boyfriend’s team, consisting of him, three varsity football players and a guy who turned down a chance to walk onto the basketball team, was projected to be a contender, and we had anointed ourselves their official cheerleaders/hecklers.  We had work to do.  I’d like to think our clever quips and exhortations to put some hustle in their game helped them into the final eight.  Granted, two of the guys now play in the NFL so they really didn’t need any athletic coaching from us.

So now I want to hear from you guys.  I can only speak from my own experience at Notre Dame, but I think Bookstore is hard to top.  I want to know, what’s the greatest collegiate athletic tradition out there?