It seems that staff reporter Allie Wieczorek, in her article “Betting with your heart: devotion or just plain dumb?” [Wednesday, March 16] forgot one of the most important parts of being a fan during this month of intense pride and prejudice for basketball teams: betting against your team’s rivals. Even though I disagree with most of her other points-namely, anything that praises Duke-I must agree with her that any true fan’s “first move is to cement [their team's mascot] in all the way to the championship.” Except of course, this year, when the University of Maryland Terrapins have earned themselves a bid to the NIT (the National Invitational Tournament, a.k.a. the “Not In Tournament”).

For those of you who, like me, are unfamiliar with the NIT, it is NCAA basketball’s equivalent of purgatory. If ESPN.com is any index of a topic’s popularity, the “2005 NIT” link is buried 23 spots from the top, right above the “2004-2005 Men’s Basketball Preview.” Few know that this bastion of prestige is the oldest tournament in college basketball, dating back to 1938. In fact, in 1970, Marquette University turned down an NCAA tournament bid to play in the NIT. So how did the contemporary sports fan come to regard the NIT as something shameful?

The answer lies in how the teams for the NCAA Tournament are selected. Because every conference gets an automatic bid, some good teams end up with the short end of the stick. For example, the opening round of this year’s “Big Dance” featured the Mid Continent Conference’s (MCC) Oakland University’s (13-17) getting crushed by the Atlantic Coast Conference’s UNC.

Meanwhile, in the twilight zone that is the NIT, the legit Terps get to play Oral Roberts, which lost to Oakland in the MCC championship. I’m still in agony because my team got swept 0-3 by Clemson this season, and the whole series of unfortunate events raises an incredibly compelling argument. Herein lies the paradox of March Madness: if not getting a bid to the tournament is only predicated on the fact that you got swept by a mediocre program, how can anyone justify Duke’s number-one seed after they were torched by the Terps, an allegedly mediocre program, twice?

Anyway, it’s taken this travesty of a tournament selection for me to really see how much loyalty and dedication accompany being a fan. Being a fan is more than automatically choosing your team to win a national title against bookies’ odds, Kantian rationality, and plain old common sense. Fandom depends on something much deeper: what you do when your team doesn’t make the tournament. For me, and the approximately 97.3 percent of America that hates Duke, being a fan is just that: hating your rival. Although I couldn’t attend either of our victory riots in College Park this year, I can pick Duke to make a dramatically satisfying exit from the tournament at the hands of a Maryland-caliber team.

This, my friends, is what being a fan is all about. Personally, this year’s championship is as insignificant as every Duke player’s NBA career. It boils down to this: as long as Coach K boards a plane to St. Louis with nosebleed-section tickets to the Edward Jones Dome, I win. And if, by some small chance, the basketball gods do favor Duke to win the NCAA tournament, I will salvage some small satisfaction in Maryland’s regular-season thrashing of Duke and our 2005 NIT championship.

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