My sister-in-law Denise called Sunday morning to ask if I’d remembered to spring my clocks forward. I had not. I had instead lost an hour the old-fashioned way, by falling asleep in the recliner during a conference semifinal that ran until almost 1 a.m. local, with a graphic in the corner reminding me, every six seconds, that Auburn was favored by a number I could not have explained to a notary.
The clock thing always gets me. They take an hour in March, they give it back in November, and in between they sell it back to you in eight-minute increments as a ‘Daylight Saving Power Hour’ presented by an erectile dysfunction tablet. I am not making that up. I saw it on my phone before I’d even put on pants.
By the time the conference final tipped Sunday afternoon, my phone had buzzed eleven times offering me ‘live spring-forward parlays.’ I don’t know what a live spring-forward parlay is. I’m seventy-one years old. I had to learn the word parlay from a man in a CarMax commercial. Apparently you can now bet on whether a kid will make a free throw before or after the next commercial break, which is essentially betting on whether the sun will come up, except the sun does not have a sponsor and the free throw does.
The game itself was fine. The broadcast was a hostage situation. There was a betting overlay along the bottom, a betting graphic in the upper right, a betting promo cut into the timeouts, and during one second-half possession a small banner appeared above the basket itself, hovering there like a UFO, advising me of the current spread. I called my friend Ray Kowalczyk at halftime to ask if he was seeing this. Ray said his TV had been doing the same thing during curling. Ray watches curling now. We are all losing something.
Coach DiMaggio used to say a basketball game was forty minutes long and the first ten didn’t matter to anybody but the players. He’d be lost out here. They’ve stretched a forty-minute game into three hours and twenty minutes by inserting a halftime show, two replay reviews per half, a sideline reporter asking the coach how he felt about the play he had just personally coached, and a roughly six-minute segment in which two analysts in a Las Vegas studio explain to me what I just watched, in case I was not also watching it.
The sideline reporter asked the winning coach, in the immediate aftermath of cutting down the net, what this meant for his NIL portfolio. The coach is sixty-two years old. He looked at her like she’d asked him to recite the Pledge in Mandarin. He said, ‘It means we won the basketball game.’ That was the best line of the broadcast and they cut away from it to a commercial about a betting app run by a cartoon goat.
Petey Corrigan, who some of you may remember from the bowling alley column in November, texted me at 9 p.m. to report he’d cleared fourteen dollars on a parlay involving three different conference finals and a player prop he could not define. Petey is sixty-eight. He has gambled more in the last calendar year than he did in his entire stretch in the Navy, and he was stationed in Subic Bay. I asked him if he was having fun. He said he was ‘engaged.’ That was the word. Engaged. Like the basketball game and Petey were courting.
The whole thing wrapped up around six, just in time for Sunday-night studio coverage to start dissecting the bracket that didn’t exist yet. They had a guy in front of a touchscreen pretending he was choosing between teams that nobody had picked. I sat in the recliner and felt the missing hour in my lower back, which is now apparently where I store time.
The real bracket comes out next Sunday. Twenty-four hours of analysts pretending the 12-seed is sneaky, sixty-eight teams nobody outside of three zip codes has heard of, and an app on my phone that’s going to ask me, four hundred separate times, if I want to put five dollars on Yale. I’m not putting five dollars on Yale. I’m not putting five dollars on anything. I’m going to watch the basketball games, the way Coach DiMaggio watched them, which is to say I’m going to yell at a television set that does not love me back.
Denise is bringing chili. She says she found the recipe on a podcast.