Ray Kowalczyk called me at 11:40 Saturday night, halfway through a beer he should not have been drinking, to inform me that the Final Four is officially set and that he has no idea who any of these people are. I told him that makes two of us, and one of us is paid to know.
The transfer portal opened Monday. It is currently Sunday. By my rough count, four kids who played in the Elite Eight this weekend have already entered their names into the portal, meaning they will not be on the team they just helped win for the team they are about to play for. One of them tweeted his portal entry before his coach finished the postgame handshake. I had to read that sentence twice and I wrote it.
Coach DiMaggio, my old high school coach, used to make us run a mile if anybody quit the team mid-season. He called quitting “a contagious disease” and he kept a list of names in a leather notebook of every kid who’d ever walked out on him, going back to 1962. The notebook had seven names in it when he retired. Today’s notebook would be a Costco binder and it would still need a second volume by April.
I’m not blaming the kids. The kids figured out the system. The kids are the only honest people left in this thing. The dishonest ones are the adults running collectives named after constellations, paying nineteen-year-olds enough money to buy a duplex in Tempe, and then acting wounded when the nineteen-year-old goes to play for a different duplex in Lawrence next October.
The broadcast didn’t help. CBS spent the last four minutes of the regional final cutting to a sideline reporter asking a 6’10” sophomore what this moment “meant for his journey.” His journey, as far as I can tell, is to a school in a different time zone by Wednesday. He answered the question with such genuine sincerity that I felt bad for him, then for the reporter, then for myself, in that order.
Petey Corrigan, who umpired Little League with me for fifteen years and now coaches eighth-grade AAU somewhere outside Akron, told me last week that two of his thirteen-year-olds have agents. Not agents like a guy at Wasserman. Agents like a guy named Brent who owns a vape store and has a LinkedIn. Petey said the parents bring up the agents the way parents used to bring up the orthodontist. He said this on speakerphone while his wife laughed in the background.
Here’s the part I’m not supposed to admit. The basketball this weekend was tremendous. The kid from Houston who hit the step-back with 1.2 left played the kind of cold-blooded fourth quarter that Coach DiMaggio would have grudgingly nodded at while pretending to look at his clipboard. There was a freshman point guard out west who passed like he could see the future. Whatever else has rotted in this sport, the actual game on the floor for two hours on a Saturday in March is still the best thing American television does. I just wish the people running it would stop apologizing for that by trying to sell me a parlay every four minutes.
The Final Four is in Indianapolis next weekend. Ray is coming over. Denise is bringing chili. She says the recipe is from a podcast hosted by two former Marines, which sounds about right for chili in 2026. I’m going to sit on my couch and root for whichever kid looks the most like he wants to be there, and I’m going to try, for two hours, not to check the portal.