I would like to state for the record that I watched Illinois basketball all season. I watched them beat Michigan State in January. I watched them lose to Iowa in a game that made me close my eyes for the last four minutes. I watched the Big Ten Tournament. I watched Brad Underwood’s press conferences, which is a thing nobody should do voluntarily and which I did anyway because I have been following this team since the Lon Kruger days and I have earned the right to suffer through a coach saying “we need to execute” for the forty-seventh time. I watched 32 games. You know who else watched 32 games? Almost nobody. You know who suddenly has opinions about the bracket? Everybody.

The Illini got a 3-seed in the South Region. They play Penn in the first round. Penn. The Ivy League champions, whose leading scorer averages 16 points a game and whose coach I could not pick out of a lineup if he were the only person in it. This should be a comfortable first-round win, and I say that knowing full well that the moment I say it, the basketball gods write it down in whatever book they keep for the purpose of humbling people from Illinois. We have been a 3-seed before. We have lost as a 3-seed before. We have lost as a 1-seed before. This program’s relationship with the NCAA Tournament is the relationship of a man who keeps going back to a restaurant that has given him food poisoning three times because “the appetizers are really good.” The appetizers, in this case, are the first weekend.

My problem is not with the seeding. The seeding is fine. Twenty-four wins, eight losses, a solid Big Ten resume — 3-seed is right. My problem is with the 40 million people who filled out brackets over the weekend and are now telling me things about my team that they learned from a 90-second ESPN segment. A guy at Schaller’s on Sunday — a guy who I know for a fact has not watched a college basketball game since the 2005 Final Four — told me Illinois “matches up well against zone defenses.” I asked him which teams in the South Region run a zone. He said, “I don’t know, but if they do, we match up well.” This is the state of bracket analysis in America. People learn one fact and they deploy it in all directions, like a sprinkler.

The bracket itself is a work of fiction that 70 million Americans will treat as a sacred text for approximately 72 hours before abandoning it entirely. I filled mine out. I have Illinois in the Sweet Sixteen because I am not a lunatic but I am also not going to put them in the Final Four again after what happened in 2024 and 2022 and 2005 and, come to think of it, every time I have ever expected anything good from an Illinois basketball team in March. The Sweet Sixteen is the correct amount of hope. It is enough to care. It is not enough to be destroyed. This is the bracket strategy of a man who has been alive for 61 years in this city, and it is the only strategy I will endorse.

What bothers me — and I realize this is going to sound like the complaint of a man who has too much time and too many opinions, which I am — is the office pool. I know for a fact that four people in my nephew’s office picked Illinois to lose in the first round to Penn. To Penn! An Ivy League team! Because they read somewhere that “3-vs-14 upsets happen 15% of the time,” which is true in the aggregate and completely meaningless in the specific, and because they think picking upsets makes them look smart. It does not make you look smart. It makes you look like someone who does not watch basketball and who thinks the tournament is a math problem. The tournament is not a math problem. The tournament is a thing that happens to people who care about it, and the math is just the part you can see from the outside.

If Illinois beats Penn — and they will beat Penn, I am saying this publicly, I am putting this in print, I am daring the basketball gods to make a fool of me one more time — they will likely face either the 6-seed or the 11-seed in the second round, and then, if they win that, they go to Houston for the Sweet Sixteen, where they could meet the 2-seed Cougars on their home floor. This is the kind of draw that the selection committee puts together when they want to remind you that the bracket is not your friend. A potential Sweet Sixteen game in Houston against Houston. In Houston. Brad Underwood will say “we need to execute” and he will be right, and it will not matter, because at that point you are not executing, you are surviving, and survival in the NCAA Tournament is not a skill you practice, it is a thing that happens to you or does not.

But that is three games away, and I am getting ahead of myself, which is the other thing that March does to people in this state. It makes you fast-forward. It makes you skip the Penn game entirely and start thinking about Houston and the Elite Eight and maybe — don’t say it, don’t think it, absolutely do not write it in the paper — further. I am not going to do that. I am going to watch the Penn game. I am going to watch it from Schaller’s, where the TV is too small and the sound is always slightly off and the guy who thinks we “match up well against zones” will be sitting two stools down telling everyone about a stat he read on his phone. And if we win, I will feel the thing you feel when your team wins in March, which is not joy exactly but something more cautious and temporary, like holding a glass that is too full and knowing you still have to carry it across the room. And if we lose — well. I’ve carried that, too. It’s March. It’s Illinois. We go back every year. The appetizers really are good.

Tom Hennessey’s column appears every Monday and whenever something happens that he finds personally irritating, which is most of the time.