I should have known better. Every year, by the end of the first weekend of the basketball tournament, my brackets are just so much smoldering wreckage. Every year, I think the Hockey tournament can save my enjoyment of filling out brackets.  And every year, I am as wrong as a push-up bra for eight-year-olds.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that statistically speaking, my chances of picking a perfect bracket in a 64-team field are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 1 (that’s 9.2 quintillion, sports fans – which means you are 24 billion times more likely to win the lottery). I mention this only because I discovered the flaw in my belief that a sixteen-team bracket would be far easier to predict. While technically it is, to do it perfectly is still leaves the odds at 380 billion to 1.