April follows March
By Margery McCurdy Plummer
The Madness of March has come and almost drifted into April. I’m referring to the ending of the basketball season and the choosing of the best of the best in tournament play. I’m coming away from it all a little mad, too, because I still don’t understand it.

I should have paid more attention last year to important terms like “seed,” “byes,” “brackets,” all those things that determine the winner, loser and outcome and final winners, boys and girls.

The one thing I have found for sure is that the object of the tournament is to get rid of the weak teams so that strong ones compete and come to the final boys’ winner and girls’ winner.

I picked a few teams that I really wanted to win. After they were out of the running, I mostly concentrated on watching team win and lose, the antics of overexcited coaches as they shook hands at the end of a game, pretending to be the best of buddies, when in actuality would prefer not to see each other for awhile.

Tournament time in my long ago days of ball playing was a time of celebration, a time we had looked forward to since Christmas. It was a time of getting ready, even to buying new clothes to wear, even though we didn’t look very “dressy” riding on the big yellow busses to the tournament sites.

It was a very different time then, and a game played by different rules. I held my own pretty well, but against the very tall, strong, aggressive girls, I would have been like a straw in a very strong wind, as would have most of my team mates.

The only thing I envy the game today is the below the knee, flowing uniforms designed for freedom of movement. What a relief they would be from the short, short, blue satin, elasticized leg things that were put on us then! They did nothing at all for the too heavy or extremely thin (I was in that category). That’s just what we wore. We were just Blue Devils, not Lady Devils.

By the calendar, Spring is officially here, and the baseball season is arriving, and fans of the local Nashville Sounds can go to a renovated, upscale stadium and greet the “Boys of Summer” and possibly hear “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” music floating in the air.