The college basketball post season is here!

Now that the conference post season tournaments are in full swing, it is the one time of year that I truly can not get enough college basketball. But maybe not for the reason you think...or even you do.

What I love most about the post season basketball tournaments are, the day games. This really, for me, is a throw-back to when I was a kid in grade school and the baseball World Series was played during the days. During those late october afternoons, every boy in my school had a dad, uncle, or even much older brother, who would call up the school during lunchtime and offer some really lame excuse about some type of "family problem", so that they would have come get "little Johnny" and take them home. After, of course, using even a dumber and MUCH lamer excuse on their bosses at work, so that they did not go in all day and spent most of the morning at the bars, talking about the upcoming pitching matchups. Of course, more often than not, the guy sitting across the table arguing why so-and-so pitcher was better than yours was often your dad's/uncle's boss anyway. (As if THEY would miss the game, and did not know what the real reason was they were not at work.) Then your dad/uncle/brother would drive to school, and having pulled us out of normally a packed nurse's room of boys with stomach aches and other assorted ailments, we would all pile in the back of a one dad's stationwagon and sneak off to the local bar to watch the game. At that, the bartenders and owners had NO fear of reprisal from local authorities about kids in a bar, because literally half the bar was cops, government officials, or some other authority figure of renown.

It was truly a "guy moment"!

With TV deals of the World Series putting EVERY game on at night, those days are long over. But, we can still have this type of "guy bonding" with our kids today every time the college basketball world begins dribbling out the clock beginning in mid-March.

And there is very little chance this will go away anytime soon as a result of TV deals. The shear volume of games and teams playing pretty much assures that. The only real crisis being when is your "favorite team" playing? And are there interesting matchups that you want to watch?

Yeah, yeah, I know. A LOT of guys can not do this sort of thing for fear of mad bosses who only have a nose for the bottomline and no life, can watch and/or listen to these afternoon games over the Internet in the comfort of their Dilbert cube. But that just does not have the "style points" of coming up with lame excuses and pulling your kids out of school just to watch a game together.

So as we head into the NCAA tournament this year, I say all of us sweatsock, armchair athletes, take some time, grab your kid and hustle off to the nearest "family friendly watering hole" and catch an afternoon game once. You and your kid will remember it for a long, long time.