March Madness or March Gladness?
Moraga, California (Near Oakland) is home to college basketball’s surprise team which dug deep enough to not only win the school’s first big national tournament game since 1959 on Thursday, but topped it off with a trip to the “Sweet 16″. (ESPN.com) The underdog beat the perennial powerhouse on Saturday giving the basketball nation a free lesson on the endless possibilities in life through the excitement of “March Madness”.
Sports have always been a thrilling way to experience the awesome potential of humanity: what seems to be impossible becomes possible on courts, fields and race tracks all over the world. There must be more going on than talent and hard work, maybe it’s simply the ability of teams and people to overcome the biggest challenge: themselves.
The game was tied with less than two minutes remaining. The powerhouse, recovering from a near devastating loss in the first round was emotionally drained and discouraged going into the second round game with the underdog; game one became an obstacle in game two. Since the powerhouse is a “powerhouse”, the team felt some level of entitlement to win, whereas the underdog came in just happy to be there and fully aware that anything can happen in “March Madness”. The underdog won the game by seven points extending their life in the tournament for at least another week by finding “March Gladness” in “March Madness”.
With the “powerhouse effect”, minor past setbacks tend to trigger the downward spiral leading to “Bad Games” or “Bad Days”. When expectations of perfect outcomes fall short in reality, more of the same become the new expectation. Since the powerhouse almost lost game one or didn’t play perfect, game two was emotionally lost before the team even took the court. The names of these teams are irrelevant because this is a scenario played out in sports and life every day.
For years, Mondays have been labeled as the least desirable day of the week; the expectation is that Mondays are always awful. In the basketball game, the underdog got more focused as the game got tighter and time expired; good days and good games seem to happen when for that moment, nothing else matters.
The powerhouse was picked by many to go far in the tournament and it wasn’t their ability, work ethic or preparation that stopped them on Saturday; the powerhouse stopped the powerhouse. The “powerhouse effect” is always caused by expectations of perfection without the acceptance of anything less. After all, is it possible to win a championship without really being in each game?
How do you think the classic story of the underdog and the powerhouse relate to daily experiences like having a bad day versus having a good day?
DW
