“You know it’s March when Baylor’s on TV,” my friend Nachie observed early last month.

“Yeah,” I said.

Yawn.

I’ve had trouble summoning the proper enthusiasm for March Madness. Perhaps I made a mistake by not filling out a bracket this year. But I don’t think so. To me, the tournament is a distraction from what I consider one of the best sports stories of the year, the resurgence of the Boston Celtics. I’ve been waiting almost two decades for something like this to occur, although I began to lose patience last year, when a young, undisciplined Celtics team tanked its way to the second-worst record in the NBA. When the Celtics didn’t get one of the top two picks in the draft, I was angry. When they traded for Ray Allen, I was even angrier. A 32-year-old shooting guard with bad ankles? It hardly seemed like the solution. But then the Celtics acquired the remarkable Kevin Garnett, which changed everything. They now have the best record in the NBA.

But I digress. I meant to talk about March Madness, and here I am talking about the Celtics. You see how it goes: I try to pay attention to the tournament and I find myself wondering if the Celtics can win a 17th title, and who they’ll play in the first round, and how they’d match up against LeBron if they had to play the Cavaliers. So I don’t care about the tournament. But I’m not alone. During a St. Patrick’s Day brunch with some friends in Brooklyn, we agreed that the tournament was of little interest to us. Perhaps it’s because we all attended Oberlin College, a small liberal arts college in northeast Ohio, so the concept of traveling hundreds of miles to root for a school team is absolutely foreign to us. We never had the opportunity to do anything like that; Oberlin’s teams don’t play in televised bowl games or tournaments. You could easily spend four years there and never attend a single athletic event.

Still, I find myself watching the tournament, though my allegiances are vague and shifting. In past years, I’ve rooted for the University of Alabama, because I lived in Alabama for a few years, and I’ll generally root for teams from New England because I’m from New England. It took a while, but I finally found a reason to take a genuine interest in this year’s tournament: Stephen Curry, the dead-eye shooting guard from Davidson. He was a thrill to watch, but Davidson didn’t make the Final Four, and so I’m casting about for another reason to watch the tournament. The games should be good. Perhaps that’s reason enough. I’m thinking I’ll root for UNC, because my friend Adam went to grad school there and I’ll be vacationing in the Durham/Chapel Hill area at the end of the month. I can’t come up with a reason to root for any other team. Can you?

It’s a little late for this, but I can’t resist. I recommend playing a game I like to call “Where’s that School?” before March Madness officially begins. I invented it with a friend when I went over to his house to watch the tournament. As soon as I walked in the door, he said, “Do you know where Xavier is?” I gave it some thought. “Indiana?” I said. “That’s the consensus,” he said. “Indiana.” But we were wrong. A google search revealed that Xavier is actually in Cincinnati. I figured out where Butler is, but now I don’t even remember. A friend on the West Coast thought Siena College was in Louisiana, and my good friend Matt said, “Siena? It sounds Canadian.”

Anyway. Keep it in mind for next year. It’s a great game.