Vitality is its own imperative.

The NCAA men’s basketball tournament is a crassly orchestrated spectacle. It’s also a wholly natural ritual. Every March, mainstream analysts shove a handful of hackneyed story lines down our throats—which would be worse news if our enthusiastic swallowing weren’t itself so worthy of celebration.

Poise means keeping your head in a time of crisis.

Passion, on the other hand, means losing it in a moment of escape.

I’m not suggesting that the tournament is an ideal outlet for our collective fervor. Ninety-six hours of nonstop couch-potatoing can’t be good for a body, and excessive Dick Vitale exposure definitely rots the brain. But then again ‘tis the season for mindless bombast. In a world where sunlight punctuates all patterns of existence, it’s hard to argue with an exclamation mark on the eve of the vernal equinox.

A mirror reflects the face of the looker.

A cheer echoes the heart of the watcher.

If you need an excuse to shout yourself hoarse this morning, let it be that you’re simply in the mood to root for rooting’s sake.

College basketball wouldn’t be half as much fun without college basketball fans. Rowdy student sections, boisterous band members, tumbling cheerleaders and the lucky bastards who catch them—they’re part of the show, no less essential to the game than the players themselves. The reason, of course, is that the action on the stage derives its meaning from the reaction in the stands. Cynics will argue that it’s a mistake to waste so much energy on the exploits of 10 overgrown 20-year-olds. I’d counter that the bigger mistake lies in believing energy ought to be conserved in the first place.

It’s good to be rational.

It’s better to be rabid.

You may have felt slightly silly obsessing about the historical performance of 12th-seeded underdogs when you filled out your bracket, but that shouldn’t stop you from hugging the first stranger you see if Cornell actually pulls it off against Temple.

Life is measured in bursts of applause. To be or not to be is beside the point; to care or not to care is what really counts. The must-read story of the NCAA tournament is that which we write ourselves, with each desperate gasp of our aimless grasping ardor. Every mammalian species is subject to an annual bout of spring fever. The one endowed with language and leaping ability seems fated by evolution to have named it March Madness.

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Walt Whitman never felt the thrill of correctly picking a first-round upset, but he did know a thing or two about transcendent emotional states:

Forty minutes to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)

Which is a fitting prologue to the next three weeks.

Because the best narratives invariably transport their narrators, and anyone who claims to be unmoved by the Big Dance is either bound for the NIT or only just saying, is all...