As predicted

 Look, don't blame Connecticut. The Huskies were just too good. They were too good all month. And you can't fault good for being, well, good.

But after all the madness (or, Madness), after all the craziness and upset-edness and a team from Conference USA and another team from the Mountain West making the Final Four, the best team won. And it was the best team, demonstrably, all through the tournament, a little soul-crushing island of sanity in an unhinged world.

In fact they were so much the best team, these Huskies, that they sucked all the whimsy out of the most whimsical NCAA tournament in recent memory.

Last night they ball-peened San Diego State by 17 in the championship game, as predicted and to practically no one's surprise. The Huskies beat everyone put in front of them by double digits. They boat-raced 31-win Gonzaga by 28 and pancaked an Arkansas team by 23 that had just knocked off 1-seed Kansas. Miami in the national semifinal was their closest call, and that didn't exactly go down to a last-second shot.

Well. Unless Miami could have concocted a 14-point shot there at the end, seeing how UConn disposed of the Hurricanes by 13.

So the Huskies were the polar opposite of drama kings, an against-form champion of a tournament defined by drama. From 16-seed Fairleigh Dickinson knocking out 1-seed Purdue on the opening weekend to tiny Florida Atlantic's march to San Diego State beating overall 1-seed Alabama on the way to the first title game ever for a Mountain West team, it was a hell of a fun ride. 

It was also very likely a sign of things to come, here in the transfer portal/NIL era. The chaos that has attended it, with players changing schools the way motorists change lanes on an expressway, means the day you could pencil in one of the bluebloods into your Final Four every year is done. It's a have-game-will-travel world now, and its axis will shift every time this player or that decides Somewhere Else U. is the "U" for him. 

This doesn't mean the best won't still be the best, as UConn showed us. But it will play hell with trying to guess who will be the best -- because as FAU and San Diego State proved, it could be virtually anyone now.

And how's that a bad thing?