Cinderella, with regrets

You might have missed it in all the excitement surrounding, I don't know, the dawn of another day perhaps, but something happened in New Britain, Conn., the other night that  both makes March wonderful and makes it unfair.

What happened was, the Red Flash of St. Francis (Pa.) beat top-seeded Central Connecticut 46-43 to win the Northeast Conference tournament and the automatic NCAA Tournament berth that comes with it.

Yes, that's right, boys and girls. Tiny St. Francis (total enrollment: 1,962 students) from even tinier Loretto, Pa. (total population: 1,196) is goin' Dancin'. It's been 34 years since the last time the Red Flash made Da Tournament, and therefore the biggest to-do Loretto's seen since the birth of the Fleenor triplets jumped the population from 1,193.

(OK, OK. So I made up that last part.)

Anyway, this immediately makes the Red Flash the most Cinderella-y of Cinderellas, on account of they're -- let's not to sugarcoat it -- a terrible basketball team. They'll come into the Madness with a 16-17 record, and according to the boys at KenPom, which figures these things, they're the 310th-ranked Division I team in the nation. Out of 364.

And Central Connecticut?

Well, the Blue Devils are 25-7, and this season they were the best team in the NEC by a country mile. They'd won 14 games in a row coming into the tournament championship game, and they'd already beaten St. Francis twice by a combined 31 points.

But, hey, you never know at tournament time, right?

And so Central Connecticut -- playing on its home floor, by the way -- squared off against the Red Flash for a third time, and neither team could hit sand if they were trekking across the Sahara. St. Francis shot 31.7 percent (19 of 60). Central Connecticut shot 30.4 percent (17 of 56). And from the 3-point arc, the two teams were a combined 8 of 43.

That's 18.6 percent, for the mathematics impaired. You could blindfold a third-grader and spin him around three times, and he'd still beat that.

But again, that's tournament time, right?

Which means, yes, everyone will be rooting for St. Francis now, and what fun it will be. But it also means, regrettably, everyone outside New Britain will forget Central Connecticut ever existed.

And that's a damn shame.

It's also the biggest flaw in the best sports month of the year, because it is unfair. If you're a smaller school playing in a  mid-major-or-lower league, it doesn't matter how well you've played or how dominant you've been for four months. All that matters is what happens on one night in a largely superfluous (except monetarily) conference tournament.

Misplace your shooting eye on that one night, and you're done. Those 25 Ws you've piled up across a long season mean nothing. The resume you've built, your regular-season championship, nothing. You might as well not have played the season at all.

It's always been my biggest beef with conference tournaments as a whole, and I fully realize that makes me a cane-pounding consarn-it coot who still mourns the death of the set shot. Nonetheless, I've always come down on the side of the long haul as opposed to instant gratification. And I suppose I always will.

Problem is, I don't know how you close a barn door that's been open so long even the smell of the horse is gone. So I fall back on one of my least favorite hackney-isms: It is what it is.

And so, go, you Red Flash. Because, dammit, it is kinda wonderful.