A blank college basketball bracket is a beautiful thing. It is a ski slope cloaked in fresh snow, enticingly unsullied, waiting to be slalomed upon.
As it fills up with picks, a bracket becomes something like a work of art, conveying a person’s ideas and hopes and imagination. It remains aesthetically pleasing. It carries a plausible narrative logic.
In that fleeting moment, a college basketball bracket is as close to perfect as it will likely ever be. Inevitably, usually as soon as the first games of a tournament tip off, things will start to get ugly.
Each March, millions of people across the country submit their picks for the N.