The Daily Cinderella, Vol. 2: ALL ABOARD THE MAINE TRAIN

A daily roundup of March Madness Minutiae, with your buzzer-beater of the day and a bunch of stories about fun teams you weren't watching.

Welcome to DAY 2 of The Daily Cinderella. It’s almost 3 p.m. on the East Coast—sorry about that, I was busy this morning. Don’t worry, the next month of my life is clear, and you’ll be getting this before noon the rest of the way.

Your Daily Cinderella: Maine

When you go to the Wikipedia page about a school’s basketball program, there’s a little box where it tells you every significant thing that basketball program has ever achieved…. and perhaps some not-so-significant things, as well. Has a program won a Division II regular season conference championship? That gets a box. Have they made the NAIA Tournament? There’s a box for that. Did they win some strange, early college basketball trophy, rusty and dusty in the dingy attic of the school’s athletic department? You know there’s a box for that.

If you go to Maine’s page, there is nothing.

No conference championships, no regular season championships, no NIT appearances. Nothing. Just empty pixels, a digital void where accomplishments should be.

Maine has already broken several decades-long streaks have already been broken in the America East Tournament. The Black Bears went 20 years without winning a conference tournament game. Not a quarterfinal, not a first-round game, just year after year of losses to other Never Made The Tourney staples like New Hampshire and Hartford. That changed this week, when they beat UMass-Lowell, the school’s first time hosting a conference tourney game since 1995.

That brought up Vermont, the massive shark in the America East koi pond. Maine had lost 30 consecutive games to Vermont. Home, road, neutral site, anywhere the Bears and Catamounts played, Vermont won. It was enough to kill this guy’s grandpa.

But on Tuesday night, the Black Bears went to Burlington and won. It might be the biggest upset of March.

If they beat Bryant on Saturday morning, they’ll make the NCAA Tournament for the first time ever.

It needs to be now. Maine’s four leading scorers, AJ Lopez, Quion Burns, Kellen Tynes, and Christopher “The Preying” Mantis (I made that nickname up) are all seniors. Their coach, Chris Markwood, may be a lifelong Mainiac, but he breathed life into a blank space. He’s not going to go unnoticed. Maine needs to win Saturday, or they’ll never, ever get a Wikibox.

So it’s all aboard the Maine Train. Now or never. 40 minutes for the rest of our lives. I’m so invested in this that it scares me.

The Daily Buzzer-Beater: St Francis, for a bid

Wanna watch an entire year of context disappear in a second? Here you go! It’s St. Francis’ Daemar Kelly calmly bringing the ball upcourt after a game-tying bucket by Central Connecticut State and calmly swishing a 15-footer to put the Red Flash in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1991.

(BTW, I’m trying to embed these so that when you hit play, it cuts straight to the game-winner. LMK if that’s working out.)

Central Connecticut State was far and away the best team in the NEC this season. Probably one of the best teams in the history of the NEC, a league of 16-seeds and high school gyms. They beat Saint Joseph’s—a much better Saint school! They led Providence by seven in the second half! They were ranked 126 spots higher than the second-best team in the league by Kenpom...

…and St. Francis, their opponent in the NEC championship game, was not the second-best team in the league. CCSU went 25-7 this year. St. Francis went 16-17. They only made the conference championship game after squeaking out 3-point wins against Wagner and a 3-point win against LIU which featured a heartbreaking last-second foul on a 3-point shooter.

Their only hope was prayer. Luckily, St. Francis is named after one of the greatest pray-ers of all time, a man whose preaching transcended language, who could tell the Gospel to birds and wolves. The St. Francis mascot, a hornier version of the Little Caesar’s guy who says PIZZA PIZZA Frankie the Friar, prepared an eloquent prayer befitting of his namesake:

And in one shot, that prayer was answered. CC was out, and Assisi was in.

I’m not even going to get to tell you about how Central Connecticut State is a historically blighted program which built one of the best teams in school history. With one shot, that cute story gets thrown in the dumpster while a sub-.500 team goes tot the NCAA Tournament. It’s brutal and it’s beautiful.

Mid-Major Heroes of the Day: UW-Green Bay

One thing about women’s college hoops is that there are a lot of mid-major teams that absolutely roll over their conferences. This year alone, we had Florida Gulf Coast, Fairleigh Dickinson, Grand Canyon, James Madison, Norfolk State, South Dakota State go undefeated in conference play, while Columbia, Fairfield, Montana State, Richmond, Southeast Louisiana, UNC-Greensboro, and UTSA had just one loss.

Another one of those teams was Green Bay, who sealed the Horizon League Tuesday with a win over Purdue-Fort Wayne. The Horizon League has not uploaded highlights of the game, but has uploaded UW-Green Bay spraying each other with shaving cream because the tournament is sponsored by Barbasol. I’m sorry, I really would have preferred to post basketball highlights, I’m just working with what the conefrence gave me.

This is what Green Bay does. The Phoenix have run off 48 (forty-eight) consecutive winning seasons, dating all the way back to 1977… before the NCAA even spoonsored women’s basketball. Their longtime coach, Kevin Borseth, retired in the offseason, and Green Bay hired Kayla Karius, a Horizon League player of the year for Green Bay about 15 winning seasons ago. In year 1 under Karius, they went 29-5, heading into the NCAA Tournament on a 22-game win streak. Not to turn a story about the spectacular accomplishments of women into one about mediocre men, but they had almost the exact inverse record of Doug Gottlieb’s 4-29 Green Bay men’s team.

Now comes the hard part. The best and worst thing about the women’s NCAA Tournament remains that the first two rounds are played home sites—great because it results in better atmospheres than the lifeless men’s tournament; brutal because it means those 18-0 and 17-1 teams have to go on the road to play top-15 opponents, making upsets incredibly rare. (There has been one all-time upset by a 14, 15, or 16 seed, and it was in 1998.) Green Bay is currently on the 12/13 line, according to our friends at Team USA Tracker. If they’re a 12, they get to play a 5-seed at a neutral site. If they’re a 13, they have to play a 4-seed on the road. We’re pulling for the Phoenix… and also about a dozen other teams which dominated their conferences.

Awful Decision Made By A Conference Executive Of The Day: XIIXIIXIIXIIXIIXIIXIIXIIXIIXIIXIIXIIXIIXIIXII

Last week the Big 12 debuted the world’s first seizure-inducing basketball court, emblazoned with the Roman numerals “XII” written hundreds upon hundreds of times.

I’m not opposed to the concept as much as the eXIIcution. Look, I get it. Sometimes you need to be flashy! I can tolerate aesthetic crimes. But no joke, something happens to my eyes when players in white uniforms move across the white XIIs on the court. It’s actually disorienting to watch games on this court and I have watched less of the Big 12 tournament because of it.

The criticism found its way to Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark, who reminded us: The ugly court meant to generate tweets and bring attention to his league is actually about providing the best student-athlete experience for the kids.

“Let me just start off by saying that that court isn’t about me, it’s about our student-athletes. When I first got here, it was all about modernizing and contemporizing our brand, connecting to culture, and getting on the consciousness of current and future student-athletes. And that’s what we’re doing…. Every student-athlete that walked on that court last week came up to me and said ‘Brett, it’s fantastic.’ They took selfies, they loved it. Today, I got here very early, Iowa State practiced, and the entire team said ‘Love it, love being on there.’ I think it’s aspirational. That’s our stage. And we wanted to make a profound statement, and I think we did, and I love it.”

Brett Yormark is right. Clearly, this is about the student-athletes, all of whom are coming up and personally thanking Brett Yormark. It’s about the student-athletes, who are telling Brett Yormark that his vision and leadership will guide the Big 12 into a future so brilliant that you can barely stand to look at it, much like the basketball court. Hundreds of student athletes are coming up to Brett Yormark with tears in their eyes and saying “sir, thank you for allowing me to stand on your big, beautiful court, sir,” and this is about them, not Brett Yormark (handsome, smart.)

Team so cool I couldn’t stop writing about them: Oregon State

Today, I ran into a little problem with writing a daily March Madness newsletter: sometimes a team just keeps winning.

I wrote about Oregon State’s back-to-back buzzer-beaters yesterday, gushing over how a team killed by conference realignment had risen from the ashes like a phoenix. (Lower case p. As previously established, the UW-Green Bay Phoenix hasn’t needed to rise from anything, because they just keep winning every year.) I figured I needed to write it up in case the Beavs lost to the Portland Pilots, the back-to-back defending champs, who went 29-4 and beat Oregon State by 25 in Corvallis a few months ago.

AND THEN THE BEAVS WON AGAIN. No buzzer-beater this time.

As a result, I must find a new beaver video. (Tough job, I know. Today I am going to drop in one of a beaver being a beaver inside of a house, apparently, sometime around Christmas. Even indoors, the Beav cannot fight its natural urge to build a dam, attempting to block a hallway with an assortment of toys, shoes, and rugs.

So it is with Oregon State. The team has been transplanted from the Pac-12 to the WCC, a temporary arrangement until Pac-12 management can attract enough schools to join the league. So Oregon State headed into a new league without so many of last year’s stars, taken out of the habitat that had nurtured them. And yet, the Beavers went on an improbable run the WCC, and ex-Beavs won the Big Ten and the Big 12. No matter the environment, their inner Beav compelled them to dam. I can’t wait to watch them building in the NCAA Tournament.