Stateside, an office in March. The work had stopped, but no one had gone home. Every desk had a printed grid on it, and grown men were filling it in like generals drawing up the order of battle.
A bracket. Sixty-four armies. One survives.
A coworker slid one across to me. "Just pick who wins, pal. It's only five bucks."
Only five bucks. He said it the way a man understates the price of a war he is certain he will win. I received the paper as if it were a field map. Sixty-four banners, and I was being asked to foresee the fate of every one.
I did not pick. I studied. I read each army's record like a scout reading dust on the horizon, weighed their wounded, accounted for the morale of a campaign played far from home.
It took me three hours. I missed lunch.
"Whoa, you went deep," the coworker said, glancing at my notes. "I just picked the cool mascots, honestly."
The cool mascots. He had committed his five bucks on the faces of the banners alone, and said it without shame. I respected it the way one respects a man who charges with his eyes closed and somehow lives. But I would win by foresight, not luck.
The first day, my chosen champion โ the army I had studied longest, the one I had staked my honor upon โ lost to a smaller school no one had heard of. Out. Dead on the field by sundown.
Half my grid collapsed with it, like a wall pulled down by one stone.
"Aw, everybody's bracket's busted. Happens every year."
Everybody's busted. He offered it as comfort, the way you tell a man the whole army drowned, not only his. And it was comfort. The bracket was never meant to be won. It was meant to be filled out in full faith, and torn apart on schedule, so that sixty-four strangers could grieve the same grid together.
A bracket cannot be conquered. It can only be mourned together.
So it was a war after all โ only no one was meant to survive it, and that was the whole joy of it. Next March I will study for six hours. I will pick with both wisdom and a cool mascot. And I will lose on the first day again, in good company.