They’re ripping the ice out of the United Center this week. Not for the Bulls — Lord knows the Bulls haven’t given anyone a reason to rearrange furniture since the last time I had a full head of hair — but for the NCAA Tournament. The Midwest Regional. Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight. March 27 and 29. College kids from schools I’ve barely heard of will be playing basketball under the same championship banners that Jordan hung, and I’m supposed to feel something about this other than old.

I walked past the UC on Monday and there were trucks outside. Big ones. The kind they use when they’re converting the floor, which is a process I’ve watched enough times to describe in my sleep: pull the ice, lay the insulation, build the court, hang the new banners, pretend the building has always been this. It takes about 48 hours. The Blackhawks’ last home game before the conversion was Saturday, which means the Zamboni drivers are currently on what the arena’s operations team euphemistically calls “a scheduled pause.” I talked to one of them outside the loading dock. He was smoking a cigarette and staring at the Michael Jordan statue like a man contemplating the passage of time. “It’s fine,” he said, unprompted. “I’ll be back in April. Probably.”

Here is my issue with March Madness at the United Center, and I want to be clear that this is not an issue with March Madness itself, which is one of the few good things left in sports: it doesn’t belong in this building. The United Center is a Chicago building. It has Chicago teams. It has Chicago memories. Six Bulls titles. Six — count them — six banners that mean something to people who live here. And now for two nights in March, the building gets handed over to, say, a 4-seed from the ACC and a 1-seed from a conference whose name has changed three times in two years, and we’re all supposed to care because CBS says so.

Now, will I watch? Of course I’ll watch. I’m not a monster. And if Illinois makes it to the Sweet Sixteen — they’re a 3-seed in the South, playing Penn on Thursday, and if you put a gun to my head I’d say they get to the second weekend — then suddenly the United Center hosting the Midwest Regional becomes the greatest thing that ever happened. But that’s the trick of the tournament, isn’t it? It’s only yours when your team is in it. Otherwise it’s just someone else’s basketball in your building, which is roughly how I feel about the Bulls most nights anyway.

The ticket situation, from what I understand, is typical NCAA: the good seats went to sponsors and university alumni associations months ago, and what’s left on the secondary market starts at $180 for a Thursday upper-deck seat that is, geometrically, closer to O’Hare than to the free-throw line. The NCAA calls this “making the tournament accessible.” I call it what it is, which is a racket dressed up in school colors. My buddy Ronnie — same Ronnie from the Sox column, the man is a reliable source of sports misery — looked at tickets and said he’d rather watch from his couch, “where the beer is cheaper and nobody makes me stand for a fight song I don’t know.”

The real winners here, as usual, are the bars. Every establishment within a six-block radius of the United Center is already advertising “March Madness specials,” which means the same beer at the same price with a paper bracket taped to the wall. The West Loop restaurants will be packed. The parking lots will charge $60. The CTA will run extra service on the Blue Line, and people will still complain about the Blue Line, because complaining about the Blue Line is the one Chicago tradition that transcends all sports, all seasons, and all levels of tournament basketball.

I’ll tell you what I will enjoy, though, and I mean this: the two minutes before tipoff of an NCAA Tournament game in a packed arena, when the lights go down and that CBS music plays — the one that sounds like important things are about to happen — there is nothing quite like that in sports. Not the Super Bowl. Not the World Series. That moment, in that building, with 20,000 people who have all convinced themselves that this year’s bracket is the one, that their 12-over-5 upset pick is going to hit, that college basketball still means something pure and uncorrupted — that’s a feeling worth having, even in a building where the Zamboni driver is out back smoking and wondering when he can come home.

Hennessey’s Take runs every Tuesday and whenever a Chicago arena reminds him that time is a flat circle.