Phew. I have recovered from the near heart attack I had during the last two minutes of regulation time, but am still kind of stunned. Go Jayhawks!

photo courtesy of Lawrence Journal World, by Nick Krug

Our Super Mario, best player ever. Isn’t he just cute as a button? And he’s from Alaska, to boot!

photo courtesy of lawrence.com, by Ailecia Ruscin

The drunken horde sufficiently recovered from Saturday’s festivities to rush downtown once again. More fireworks, more drunken buffoonery, and more boobs. Unfortunately I didn’t see any naked people fall off cars this time.

I fully admit I am a fair-weather fan, and really just start to pay attention to basketball during the tournament season. It is, for me, as much of a sociological phenomenon as anything else. And I can’t really see myself following NBA games, or any other sport really (like football, for instance: I don’t care how well we do, I can’t get excited about watching people alternately play for two seconds and then huddle for ten minutes).

But dammit, when a college basketball game is good, it can be the most spectacular drama, and I find myself jumping up and down, and hooting and hollering with the rest of them. Rock Chalk!

(Having said that, I don’t ever see myself getting behind things like this. I just can’t take that level of cheese.)

A terrible sickness has descended upon my town, infecting its denizens with a disorder known as March Madness:

Symptoms include severe liver damage, impaired brain functioning, enhanced vocalizations, display of destructive behavior, pyromania

For those of you blissfully unaware of basketball and sports in general, Lawrence, my hometown, is currently consumed with the yearly drama known as the NCAA basketball tournament. This year, we are doing particularly well, having advanced to the championship game. Not only that, we did so by trouncing the team of our former coach, Roy Williams, who is immensely reviled in this town for his “betrayal” of our team - he left KU for UNC in the wake of our championship game loss in 2003 against Syracuse. Well do I remember the aftermath - people sadly urinating in the streets, feeble curses at “free throws” and fists raised to the sky. That’s when I first tuned in to the interesting phenomenon of sports fanaticism: fans of winning teams are more likely to destroy their town than fans of losing teams. It doesn’t make that much sense to me (wouldn’t we want to go burn the town of the losing team?), but of course, nowhere in the history of humanity has a beer-fueled mob of people acted rationally.

The exciting drama culminated in one of the most spectacular displays of mob mentality I have ever personally witnessed. I didn’t take any photos, thinking it unwise to bring expensive machinery into the fray, but luckily other people did. Check out the mayhem here.

The photos don’t do justice to the sheer scope of the insanity. The sea of people stretched for six whole blocks. Where cars could drive, they were immediately swarmed by raucous fans, who jumped on top of them to dance. We even spotted a naked man dancing on an SUV, who wasn’t up for long before making an unceremonious faceplant into the concrete. People set off fireworks - actual fireworks, not just piddly firecrackers - in the middle of the street. The alleyways flowed with cheap discarded beer, and the urine of impatient drunks.

This was no fickle mob; it held strong for hours. By the time we stumbled home, around 1:30 in the morning, the sea of people had dispersed, but there were still strong crowds of revelers, un-felled by alcohol and car dancing, loudly hooting and hollering about our dramatic victory over Roy. Hopefully this should bury the hatchet for the more rabid KU fans, who insist that he personally betrayed them somehow by leaving (one woman commented that she and her family will never wear light blue again because of Roy, wtf?).

Note that this was the reaction to our winning the semifinals. Should KU manage to beat Memphis, a formidable team with only one loss to its name this season, I do fear for the safety of my house. It’s just far enough from downtown that it should be safe from the raging fires that will consume Mass Street. I think.