CORKY: The spirit of ‘March Madness’

It begins on an inner city playground. A basketball court of broken concrete and polished hardwood dreams.

Some little kid pushes a two-handed shot at a hoop that has no net.

It begins in the driveway of a home in Indiana, Kentucky, Carolina, Missouri, Kansas. Sons of farmers or railroaders, miners or laid-off auto workers take jump shots at nylon nets draped on orange rims bolted to fan-shaped backboards from Wal-Mart.

It begins in a thousand high school gyms in Ohio, Texas, California and Arizona. Cheerleaders dance, and proud moms and dads sit on cramped wooden bleachers to watch tall, skinny teenagers in baggy shorts and oversized sneakers.

It begins on college campuses, the gateway to the Big Dance.

The NCAA Tournament, the championship of college basketball, is a national epidemic of joy.

And it is the greatest sports circus on the planet.

Once the conference tournaments producing automatic qualifiers are out of the way, Selection Sunday — basketball’s Christmas Morning — will be held on March 15.

First round games will be played March 19, leading to the Final Four, April 4-6, at Ford Field in Detroit.

The Madness of March turns into the Angst of April for all but one team, the eventual NCAA champion.

But there is no more dynamic, spirited and passionate couple of weeks on the entire sports calendar.

The first NCAA Tournament was held in 1939, featuring eight teams. Oregon defeated Ohio State, 46-33, in the championship game played in front of 5,500 fans at Patten Gym in Evanston, Ill.

For a dozen years, the NCAA wasn’t even the “major” college basketball tournament. It was rivaled, and often surpassed by, the National Invitational Tournament in New York. Many times, teams chose the NIT rather than the NCAA event at the end of the season.

A number of schools entered both tournaments. Only one ever captured both championships in the same year, however. That was City College of New York, in 1950.

In 1944, Utah lost in the opening round of the NIT, then went on to defeat Dartmouth, 42-40, to win the NCAA championship.

The tournament was expanded to 16 teams in 1951, when Kentucky defeated Kansas State, 68-58, for the title at Williams Arena in Minneapolis.

Probably the greatest championship game ever played was North Carolina’s 54-53 victory over Kansas in three overtimes, at Kansas City’s Municipal Auditorium in 1957.

When Lute Olson coached Arizona to an 84-79 single-overtime win over Kentucky for the 1997 national championship at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis, the Wildcats became the first — and only — school to defeat three No. 1 seeded teams: Kansas, North Carolina and Kentucky.

This year, the tournament will have 65 teams and attract more than 700,000 fans to various sites. The Final Four will be played in Detroit’s marvelous Ford Field, a 65,000-seat facility covering 1.85 million square feet of development.

From coast to coast, border to border and even beyond, fans will watch their TV sets and check the brackets from their office pools, plugged into the grandest, wildest and sometimes wackiest of all sporting events.

And it all starts back there on big city playground courts, and on driveways with a backboard attached to the garage.

It begins inside little kids brimming with hope.

Their dream is to shoot well enough and jump high enough, to put a ball roughly 9.349 inches in diameter through a hoop 18 inches wide ...

To handle that ball as if it were a tangerine ...

And to lead the Wildcats, the Hoosiers, Tar Heels or Tigers ... the Jayhawks, Buckeyes, Longhorns or Bruins, their favorite team whoever it may be, to the championship.

March Madness is more than entertainment, more than a sporting event.

It’s a spiritual uplift.

Former Tucson Citizen columnist Corky Simpson writes a weekly commentary for the Green Valley News.