For the rest of March, we are all UMass Minutemen.
The UMass men’s basketball team was awarded the No. 6 seed in the Midwest Region, and will play either Tennessee or Iowa Friday, who will play for the No. 11 seed Wednesday.
Coach Derek Kellogg – a holdover from the golden era of UMass hoops in the 1990s – led his club to a 24-8 record prior to their loss against George Washington in the quarter finals of the Atlantic 10 tournament.
It’s uncertain how many games UMass will win in this year’s tournament. The Midwest Region is largely considered the hardest bracket on the board, as it features three teams that advanced to the Final Four in 2013 – Wichita St., Michigan and Louisville. The region also includes perennial powerhouses Duke, Texas and Kentucky.
For what it’s worth, super genius Nate Silver gives the Minutemen a less than 1 percent chance at winning it all. Which is probably fine with the 22,000 kids who populate ZooMass. They’re used to getting dissed by hoity-toity academic types.
The greater Boston area is a bastion of higher learning. Eight of the top 50 national universities according to U.S. News are practically within walking distance of each other, and three of the top 20 liberal arts colleges in the country are in Massachusetts as well.
UMass Amherst – the largest campus in the state’s school system – possesses an acclaimed business school and is the 91st-ranked national university. Not too shabby, especially considering its yearly in-state tuition is nearly $30,000 less than Boston University’s, for example.
Despite the fact that Amherst is out near the Berkshires – an area that few who reside in the metro Boston area dare travel to – arguably no school better identifies with the spirit of this area than UMass. Hell, their pre-St. Patrick’s Day bash was probably more fun than anything you did over the weekend.
Think back to your high school days, when you spent your Friday nights driving around with your buddies and a 3o-rack of Bud Light looking for a place to crash. Did you know anyone who went to MIT or Harvard?
Of course you didn’t. In fact, you probably had never even stepped foot inside the People’s Republic of Cambridge.
This was long before you died inside, when “going out for a drink” meant slamming down cheap booze in someone’s basement instead of sipping on a $10 cocktail at some networking event in the Innovation District. The ivory-covered walls of Harvard’s campus might as well have been in another world.
Boston College is a little closer to your roots, likely because one of your uncle’s or father’s friends played football with a member of the Flutie family growing up.
But then one of your cousins went there, and started portraying it as an Ivy League school with an SEC-caliber athletic program. You were turned off forever. (For the record, BC is neither.)
BU? Forget about it. Nothing but busy-bodies from New Jersey, pretentious hipsters and an alienated alumni base over there.
Even if you didn’t attend UMass, you know hundreds of people who did. They may not wear slim fit jeans or understand how to order a coffee at Starbucks, but they sure know how to have a good time.
The kinds of guys who went to UMass are the dudes who you can call up on a Sunday to watch the Patriots, drink from noon-8:00 p.m. and smoke a joint to finish the day off.
They all have jobs, and might even have a better job than you. But they don’t act like it. They don’t feel the need to check their smartphones every two minutes, and think of snarky tweets to send to their minuscule amount of followers on Twitter.
For the record, I don’t have fun. I haven’t worn sweatpants since I graduated high school, and can’t let a moment pass without stuffing my face inside some sort of app.
But I want to pretend I’m not like that for a couple of weeks.
Let’s go UMass. Boston may be changing, but you always stay the same. Thank you.
