Every year a calamity called March Madness strikes the US and obliterates a month of economic productivity.

I’ve always looked at the NCAA like a reliable co-worker who contracted the flu: You know he got it and feel bad he’s incapacitated and not at his best, but you don’t want it, nor do you care to hear the gory details of how it all plays out for him, only that he’s over it.

Not being a sports guy, I have known the bracket mostly as an annual ritual of being cajoled into throwing $20 into the office pool, only to see the person who picked their teams based on the mascot somehow win the whole thing.

The name March Madness even sounds like it derives from a combination of excessive Spring Break inspired collegiate drinking with blind scholastic team loyalty in spite of impossible odds.

However, there’s more than a handful of non-students who repeatedly (and gladly) suffer this delirium every year. In 2018 the Final Four is going down in San Antonio, Texas.

To paraphrase Lloyd Bridges: “Looks like I picked the wrong week to visit San Antonio.”

We had no idea any of this was going on until we went downtown, but it certainly explained why there were so many 7 foot tall men wandering around the Riverwalk, CBS Sports had taken over the plaza of the Alamo, and the Residence Inn Downtown was asking $500 a night.

Madness, indeed.

— The Impostor