for years, chris and i have participated in a pool with my extended family. there are around 30 participants, and at $5 and winner-takes-all, it can be a nice chunk of change if you're the victor. (not that i would know anything about that.)
with liam being such an avid reader of the sports section each morning and an absolute sports freak, it seemed only natural that he would join the family pool. add the fact that he's a numbers guy (and the bracket is chock-full of numbers), i just knew he'd be ecstatic to participate.
i should have known better.
"no thank you," he replied when i first suggested the idea. "i don't know who will win."
"that's the whole point," i explained. "you DON'T know. it's incredibly hard to predict. but that's the fun of it -- getting lucky!"
he shook his head. "i don't think so. i like to be right. and i'm not sure i'll be right."
i looked at him, incredulously. and it all sort of started to click. he took a series of tests last month at school for academic placement, and the area where he faltered consisted of problems that challenged him to think outside the box. when we met with the psychologist to go over the results, she told us that he had explained to her that he would rather not answer at all than to answer and be wrong.
i won't go into the long conversation we had about THAT, but apparently it had fallen on deaf ears, because here he was, presented with the opportunity to win $150 just by being lucky, and he was flat-out refusing.
so what does a mom do? i forced him to play, of course. i thought it would be a good experience to
so he studied his blank bracket. he made a lot of smart choices based on seeds, and he made a few emotional ones (namely, picking davidson, chris's alma mater, to go to the sweet sixteen.) and then he made a fatal decision. he chose missouri to win the entire thing.
and, as anyone in the world knows who follows one iota of sports, missouri became only the fifth team in the history of the NCAA tournament to go out in the first round as a #2 seed. (interesting fact: the first #15 seed to ever win was none other than my beloved richmond spiders, in 1991 against syracuse. U of R is also the only team who can say that they've won as a 15th, 14th, 13th, AND 12th seed. and i am hereby redeeming myself for my total airheaded post about football, thank you very much.)
but back to the story at hand. after submitting his entry online, liam became a bit obsessed on the first day of the tournament, asking constantly if he could get on the website and track the standings. he'd periodically report his ranking, excited to see his bracket in the top three at one point. he started to ponder what he was going to do with all his winnings, despite my warnings that things can change quickly.
and then the world came to an end. chris and i were at the club on friday night and happened to see the final minutes of the missouri game, both of us ecstatic to witness such an upset. you've always got to root for the underdog, right? until it hit us what this meant for liam. when we picked him up from the kids room, we decided not to say anything, but somehow he already knew. and all the way home, he wailed from the back seat, inconsolable. (think of a three-year old temper tantrum, but in a seven-year old body. NOT FUN.)
as we finished brushing his teeth that night, he looked up at me with bloodshot eyes with one more thought. "maybe when i wake up tomorrow morning," he said, "the paper will say that norfolk state got charged with violations and they'll put missouri back into the tournament. think that can happen?"
when i told him not to get his hopes up, he muttered something about this being the dumbest idea ever and how he's never going to enter a pool again, before stomping off to bed.
sort of gives the term march MADNESS a whole new meaning.
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