How to watch the NCAA basketball tournament?

While wearing your Virginia Tech T-shirt, naturally. Or your Grand Canyon University sweatshirt. Or your favorite team’s swag, even if it’s a Florida hat or something, if you must. Even if your school didn’t make it — hello Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, or should that be goodbye? — adopt a team and start rooting.

How really to watch it, of course, is to get up early, especially in Arizona, and make sure you’ve got fresh batteries in the remote. The tournament is a lot different this year than last year — for instance, this year they’re actually playing it. COVID-19 knocked out one of the biggest and most unique sporting events of the year in 2020, one of the true this-thing-is-real moments.

This year it’s back, the same smorgasbord of basketball delights we typically expect; you can once again pull a warm blanket of basketball over yourself and stay covered up all day. But the timing is a little different. And your bracket, no matter how closely you follow college basketball, is probably basically worthless. COVID-19 wreaked havoc on the season, with cancellations and quick reschedules making it difficult to get a read on how good any of the teams really are.

Except for Gonzaga and Illinois. Them, you can count on.

But who cares? The fun of this thing is the thing itself.

How to watch the first March Madness game and the last

That said, if you were looking for the first round of games Thursday, they aren’t there. This year the play-in games (which the NCAA calls “First Four,” even though they’re the last four picked) are on Thursday and the first round is Friday. That means the second round extends into Monday. Fine by me — much like “Monday Night Football” when it was a thing, it extends the weekend.

The Sweet 16 and Elite Eight will be played Saturday, March 27 through Tuesday, March 30 — an even longer weekend! The Final Four will take place April 3, and the national championship on April 5.

Once again CBS will broadcast the games, along with an array of Turner networks — TBS, TNT and truTV. (I’ll pause for a moment while you check your carrier to see if you get truTV, an annual search.)

At home with Dave Pasch: Why the ESPN announcer is feeling ‘ready for anything’

As always, with this many games on that many networks, the announcing teams will run from the big guns to the rarely seen. Jim Nantz, Bill Raftery, Grant Hill and Tracy Wolfson will be the lead broadcast team, calling the Final Four and the championship game, among others. Lisa Byington will make history as the first woman to call play-by-play during the men’s tournament.

The network producers always do a nice job of zipping around from game to game if there’s a nail-biter at the end — March Madness and all that — although it’s also fun to just surf around.

Although, they won’t be zipping around four regions of the country this year. Instead they’ll be zipping around Indianapolis, where all the tournament games are being played.

And those first two days, when there are 32 games in 48 hours? That is sports heaven, for my money the best two days in sports. The sheer volume of games makes it good; the possibility of upsets makes it great. Actual upsets make it fantastic.

Why watch the tournament? Because shared national moments matter

Speaking of: I’m pulling for Virginia Tech because I’ve been friends with their head coach, Mike Young, since the seventh grade. Technically if Tech, a No. 10 seed, beats Florida, a No. 7 seed, that’s an upset. See? March Madness.

Madder still: If GCU, a No. 15 seed, can somehow topple No. 2 seed Iowa in its region. (The game is scheduled for 3:25 p.m. Arizona time on Saturday on TBS.) That would be huge — it’s the kind of thing that gets replayed forever, a bracket buster for the ages — and can change the face of a program. So go Antelopes.

The shared national moment seems like a dying notion, unless you share it with Oprah, Harry and Meghan. The Grammy Awards and Golden Globes ratings tanked in epic fashion. Small wonder. We’re still living in isolated pockets, many of us, waiting out a virus and betting on a vaccine that can’t get to everyone soon enough.

This is a chance to get back together, if not in person, at least in spirit. Even people who don’t like basketball fill out brackets. Why? Because it’s fun, that’s why. And fun is something we can use a lot more of here lately. The NCAA Tournament provides that, and then some.

Here’s the complete March Madness TV schedule

Find all the games on TV at ncaa.com/news/basketball-men/article/2021-march-madness-schedule.

Reach Goodykoontz at [email protected]. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: @goodyk.

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