Picked-up pieces while reminding you to say “thanks” to Chaim Bloom for Roman Anthony, Wilyer Abreu, Trevor Story, Garrett Whitlock, and Marcelo Mayer . . .
⋅ Ever feel like there’s a big party going on and we’re not invited?
Welcome to March Madness, Massachusetts style.
Across America, college basketball is all the rage. Everybody’s got a bracket and every television in every bar features 10 college players running up and down some court in Oklahoma City, Fort Worth, Buffalo, or Baton Rouge. Bill Raftery is once again ubiquitous and the nation is agog at the skill sets of Sarah Strong and AJ Dybantsa. If you check anything on Google this week, you’ll notice the site’s search option features an image of a basketball rattling through a rim as the clock ticks down to zero.
Wow. These three weeks are no doubt a highlight for cities and towns with powerhouse college hoop teams. Imagine living on Tobacco Road or in Storrs, Conn., where you have a chance to crown multiple champions. Better yet, imagine fans of the College of Charleston women or the California Baptist men, both of whom were invited to the dance for the first time.
This is not us in the Bay State.
Here in Massachusetts, March Madness is March Sadness. Or March Badness. Truly. We’re darn near March Teamless. We have virtually no say in this national hoop-a-palooza.
Woe is us. Out of 136 teams competing for the NCAA Division 1 championships, Massachusetts’ lone representative school this year was the Holy Cross women’s team, a 15 seed, which lost to No. 2 Michigan, 83-48, in Ann Arbor.
That’s it for us. Our state has no team in the men’s bracket. Not Boston College. Not UMass. Not Harvard. Not Boston University. Not Northeastern. Not Holy Cross. We are the nowhere men of the NCAA.
If you widen our loop to include all of New England, it’s not much better. Teams from Rhode Island (11 seed) and Vermont (14), as well as 11th-seeded Fairfield, joined Holy Cross as small-school long shots in the women’s draw, but all three lost Saturday. On the men’s side, New England has the vaunted University of Connecticut. And that’s all folks.
We know the Huskies are a powerhouse in men’s and (especially) women’s college basketball. Storrs has a blue-blood basketball tradition almost equal to that of UCLA and North Carolina. Geno Auriemma’s women’s program in this century is every bit as dominant as John Wooden’s Alcindor-Walton Bruins of the 20th century. UConn women won the NCAAs last year and is 35-0 after a first-round rout Saturday of Texas-San Antonio. Coached by the maniacal Dan Hurley, Connecticut’s men won it all two years ago and are a two-seed in the East Regional this year.
Swell. But who around here really thinks of UConn as a Greater Boston school, or even part of New England? Storrs might as well be a New York City bedroom community like Greenwich or New Canaan. There are Yankees fans there. No place with Yankees fans counts as New England.
I could bore you and tell you that college basketball once mattered greatly in New England. I could talk about Holy Cross filling the old Garden more than the Celtics in the 1950s, and reminisce about when Cooz and friends actually won the whole thing 147 years ago (actually, 1947). I could talk about Marvin Barnes and Ernie D and Dave Gavitt’s run to the Final Four in 1973. I could talk about Dr. J. at Curry Hicks Cage and Coach Cal refusing to lose (or adhere to the rules) when Marcus Camby and UMass made it to the Final Four in 1996. I could talk about Jim O’Brien taking BC to the Elite Eight with Billy Curley (1994) and Al Skinner getting the Eagles into the tourney seven times from 2001-09.
But I’m not going to do that. This is 2026 and March Madness is unfolding across America and everybody has a bracket and we are on the outside looking in from the campus center at New England’s university of Loserville.
⋅ Quiz: 1. Name seven head coaches since 2000 to win multiple men’s NCAA Division 1 basketball championships; 2: Five of the 10 oldest living Baseball Hall of Fame players (not managers) once played for the Red Sox. Name them (answers below).
⋅ My soccer friends are convinced that the “dry run” pre-World Cup friendly between Brazil and France (two of the best three teams in the world) Thursday at Gillette Stadium at 4 p.m. will be a transportation/parking nightmare. Perhaps it will be the event that inspires Boston 26 and state authorities to get their acts together for this summer’s seven World Cup games. Can’t wait.
⋅ Celtics fans should circle April 9 on their calendars. That’s when the Celts play the Knicks at Madison Square Garden for their 80th game of the season. It could be a pivotal game in both teams’ quest to get the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference which is the best way to avoid having to play the top-seeded Pistons in Round 2.
⋅ Conversely, don’t circle the NBA meetings (March 24-25) on your calendar if you’re thinking Fenway Sports Group is in play for an expansion franchise in Las Vegas. FSG’s interest in the NBA cooled after the Celtics were sold to Bill Chisholm’s group for $6.1 billion. Look for Seattle to be back in the NBA (where it belongs!) when the Board of Governors announce their inevitable expansion plans.
⋅ Rick Pitino: Seven schools (including interim coach at Hawaii in 1975-76), 24 NCAA Tournaments, 913 wins. And he almost got to play with Julius Erving at UMass. Pitino was on the freshman team in Erving’s final season with the Minutemen in 1970-71. Pitino can play the disrespect card now that the Red Storm are a five-seed in the East.
⋅ Speaking of Pitino, can we stop with March Madness references to “student-athletes” and NIL? These are professional athletes. And it’s not NIL, it’s wages for work. Seriously. Pretty soon big-time college ballers will have 401(ks) for their “NIL money.”
⋅ Let me get this straight, the Mets are retiring Carlos Beltrán’s No. 15 but have not yet retired the No. 8 of the late Gary Carter?
⋅ The Yankees aren’t crying over trading Carlos Narváez to the Red Sox because they are very high on the 22-year-old righthanded starter they acquired in the deal,Elmer Rodriguez, who pitched well for Puerto Rico in the World Baseball Classic.
⋅ Try as you’d like, don’t forget Yankees righty Cam Schlittler, the Mass. born-and-raised righthander who sent the Red Sox home in October, beating the Bostons, 4-0, in winner-take-all Game 3. He’s only got 14 big league starts to his name, but he looks like the Yanks’ Game 2 starter next Friday in San Francisco. The 6-foot-6-inch hurler fanned 12 Sox and walked zero in eight innings of sizzle and smoke in the Yankee Stadium clincher. Schlittler played for Walpole High in the Bay State Conference, then Northeastern, before the Yankees took him in the seventh round of the 2022 draft.
⋅ It’s a shame that the epic WBC semifinal between Team USA and Dominican Republic was marred by Cory Blaser’s ridiculous strike three call on a slider well below the knees of Geraldo Perdomo to end the ballgame. Mason Miller’s eighth and final pitch to Perdomo was a ball. Period. I’m not a big fan of the automated ball-strike challenge system and am generally OK with a little human error, but the end of that otherwise great ballgame has me rethinking my position. It was amazing there wasn’t a riot on the field or in the stands. With everything at stake, the Dominican team did a better job keeping composure than Jaylen Brown in San Antonio a couple of weeks back.
⋅ By the way, Brown, who openly claims the refs are against him, took 21 free throws in his 41-point outing against the Suns at the Garden on Monday.
⋅ The good people of Buffalo are finally going to see playoff hockey again after a 14-year drought.
⋅ A new one for the reading list is “The Bosses of the Bronx,” by indefatigable New York Post columnist Mike Vaccaro (the man writes 10 columns a week). Vaccaro’s latest tome is subtitled “The Endless Drama of the Yankees Under the House of Steinbrenner,” which means plenty of juicy Red Sox stuff, including more about the infamous Larry Lucchino-Steinbrenner feud. Vaccaro describes Lucchino as “the last great foil of [Steinbrenner’s] life,” reminding us that before Larry built San Diego’s spectacular Petco Park, George looked around shabby Jack Murphy Stadium (the Padres’ home before Petco) and said, “Tell Lucchino his stadium looks like a cow pasture.” Lucchino’s revenge came when he labeled the Yankees “The Evil Empire,” after the Red Sox lost out on the Jose Contreras negotiations. Deep into this book, you’ll find a wonderful vignette from the midnight hours after the Sox finished their delicious 2004 ALCS comeback against the Yankees in the Bronx. Long after Game 7, while Boston fans partied behind the third base dugout as Sox players and their families drenched one another on the fabled New York diamond, nervous Yankee employees feared The Boss would erupt.
“Keep the lights on as long as they want to stay,” Steinbrenner told his employees. “They’ve earned it.”
⋅ Congrats to 87-year-old Joe Amorosino (dad of the former Channel 7 sports anchor with the same name), a legendary coach at Quincy High School who gathered with more than two dozen of his Hall of Fame ballplayers at the Quincy Marriott last weekend. Coach Amo is in four athletic Halls of Fame, including Plymouth State, Sharon and Quincy High Schools, and the Massachusetts Basketball Coaches Association.
⋅ Quiz answers: 1. Mike Krzyzewski (Duke, 2001, ’10, ’15), Jim Calhoun (UConn, 2004, ’11), Roy Williams (North Carolina, 2005, ’09, ’17), Billy Donovan (Florida, 2006-07), Bill Self (Kansas, 2008, ’22), Jay Wright (Villanova (2016, ’18), Dan Hurley (UConn, 2023-24); 2. Luis Aparicio (91), Juan Marichal (88), Carl Yastrzemski (86), Tony Perez (83), Fergie Jenkins (83).
Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at daniel.shaughnessy@globe.com. Follow him @dan_shaughnessy.