Its Madness, I tell you!

March is a month of sports in my family.  I think I could safely say it started when my parents started having children.  See, they had three daughters before they had a boy.  I wouldn't say my parents pushed us into sports or forced us to be "tomboys" because we liked to play basketball or volleyball.  The fact is, my dad really liked sports and we liked spending time with my dad so we grew up watching games with him.  We learned to yell at the tv and holler about bad calls.  We would cheer and scream and jump up and down when our teams won.  Our living room was often one full of neighbors and kids and other family members joining us for popcorn, kool-aid and games.

I will never forget the night Danny Ainge dribbled the entire court to give BYU a win over Notre Dame in the 1981 NCAA March Madness tournament.  Our living room might as well have been the actual location of the game for as much celebration was happening there :)  I will never forget checking out of seminary in 9th grade to head down to the Marriott Center in order to watch an exhibition game with the Boston Celtics who had three BYU guys at the time.  Nor will I forget watching Larry Bird play his last game here in Salt Lake at the Salt Palace.

When we joined the big time and got cable, that opened up a whole new world of Atlanta Braves baseball and I remember watching Dale Murphy and Brett Butler (who I thought was very handsome in my younger years) since baseball was now available through the miracle of tv.

We watched baseball and basketball and football.  Golf came along later.  We avoided boxing (just because its stupid) and I somehow fell in love with tennis watching Ivan Lendle and Stefan Edberg and a very young, new American named Andre Agassi.  Most recently, I've adopted soccer as my sport.  It was always fun to call home from college and tell dad about how you had bested some dumb boy with your boundless knowledge about fouls or penalites or how many championships a team had.  Its taken my mom most of her married life to find out how best to deal with all the sports fanatics in her family, but she's held up well. 

Its now March and our favorite thing is coming up in one week... Selection Sunday.  Its the day the colleges find out if they're going dancing in the NCAA tournament.  Its the day we all start scrambling to read up on the teams so we can fill out our brackets by game time.  Is it anything major or life changing?  Probably not for any of us, but it IS our thing.  Its our family time.  And I'm so looking forward to it!