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It’s Daylight Savings Saturday night, and that means somewhere between the time I go to bed and the time I awake, an hour will have evaporated from my life.

If I had written a log of how I spent my time today, however, it would become readily apparent that losing one hour of my time to our annual save-the-light campaign is the least of my worries.

For starters, I’ve been “losing” hours all day.

I began the day with high motivation and grand intentions of taking down the Christmas lights that are perched atop my gutters and silently threatening to stay there through the Ides of March. In order to embark on such a dreaded task, however, I deemed it necessary to first plop down on my couch for a moment of pre-chore motivational contemplation (read: “TV-watching”). In that precise moment, I became a victim of March’s silent productivity killer: madness—MARCH MADNESS.

Unproductive Marches have plagued my life since the fourth grade. I remember the moment clearly; it was the most important 2.1 seconds of my relationship with sports. I sat on the floor in my grandparents’ house and heard my dad say, “There’s not enough time.”

Somehow, in a moment of fourth grade wisdom, I uttered in response, “Two seconds is an eternity in college basketball.”

Vern Lundquist’s historic call for the history books took over from there

“There’s the pass to Laettner……puts it up…..YEEEESSSSSSSSS!”

Click HERE to relive that moment.

I was hooked. Of course, I had been a sports nut since birth, really, but that was the moment that truly cemented my love for March.

Much to the chagrin of my poor mother, other memorable March moments would follow during my tenure in school, and each seemed to take precedence over doing chores or homework.

There were Chris Webber’s timeout, Arkansas’s baggy shorts, Princeton’s back-door cuts, Tyus Edney’s coast-to-coast speed, Richmond’s 15th-seed upset, Richard Hamilton’s buzzer-beating second effort, Bryce Drew’s miracle three, and more.

Slowly, the madness began to devour me, much like all my guy friends. In a move that would guarantee future years of heartache, I even decided to attach my March happiness to a team whose mascot was a Jayhawk. As such, Jayhawk-related names—most of misery, but some of joy—haunt my March memories: Danny and the Miracles, Bucknell, Bradley, Bibby, Mario Chalmers, and more come to mind.

In our modern day, technology has only heightened the fervor for March. Otherwise driven and dutiful employees turn to the “boss button” to hide their online tournament-watching indiscretions. Online tournament pools seem to make it necessary for an employee to follow the fare of the at least 20 internet brackets he or she has filled out. Various estimates put the U.S. employer dollar loss in productivity to be just shy of two billion dollars (Click HERE). I would have to guess they are probably close to being right. I mean, personally, I wouldn’t know anything about a loss of productivity at work in March…

I do know that this March, I will be following my Jayhawks in yet another nerve-filled run through March. With Kansas, you never know when your heart will be broken (This is eerily similar to experiences with women in my lifetime). I hope to see the boys from Lawrence on the ladder taking down the nets at March’s end.

Maybe then, my neighbors will finally see me on my ladder taking down those unsightly springtime Christmas lights.

P.S. If you can spare about five minutes and 50 seconds of productivity (You can skip the North Carolina part of the video!) these 15 NCAA buzzer beaters will help you get in the mood for this week’s forthcoming Madness. Click HERE

About the author: Andy Herrmann

Andy is an oh-so-inquisitive twenty-something living in Hastings.  He had a quarter-life crisis early, at the age of 23. He is an avid moviegoer and a fan of things like books, parks, music, food, road trips, and any interesting combinations thereof.