Mike Celizic

Among the many reasons to be excited about the current edition of March Madness, one stands out as a cause for many to celebrate before the first games even start: Duke is just another team in the NCAA Tournament bracket.

It defies logic that there was such rejoicing when Duke lost in the first round of the ACC tournament, pretty much guaranteeing itself the sixth seed in the tournament that is its lot, and there are some who would argue that even that’s too good for the Dookies.

Sure, it’s possible to find reasons to dislike Duke, but those reasons would be common to many other teams that don’t generate the emotion that Duke does. And most of them — the coach is arrogant and the team succeeds because it gets all the best players –—are things we’d be and do if we were in the same position.

Just the same, it’s a better tournament with Duke as just another team, if only for one year, just as baseball is more fun when the Yankees struggle, college football is more fun when Notre Dame stumbles, and the NFL is more fun when the Cowboys can’t get out of the wild-card round.

It defies logic. As Herm Edwards famously said when he was coach of the New York Jets, "You play to win the game." You’ll have a hard time finding anyone to argue that point. So why is it that when a team comes along that follows those simple instructions and wins just about all the time, everybody hates it?

The reason is in the old saying about rooting for a dynasty: "Cheering for the Yankees is like cheering for General Motors." Times have changed.

Cheering for General Motors is more like cheering for the Kansas City Royals these days, while cheering for the Yankees has become like cheering for Exxon.

Basic human psychology explains it, and it was probably put best by Wilt Chamberlain, who was the greatest player of his day — and most other days —in the NBA but was constantly criticized. "Nobody," he observed, "cheers for Goliath."

That’s because most of us aren’t Goliath, so we can’t identify with the giant when he wins. But we can identify with the little guy — David — who knocks him off. But in order for that to happen, there has to be a Goliath to knock off.

That’s the role that Duke plays in college basketball — the Goliath that everybody wants to knock off. The team’s dominance of the ACC is easy to distill into numbers: this year’s first-round loss was just the second it’s suffered in the last 25 ACC tournament games. There may be depression in Durham, but there is rejoicing everywhere else.

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This tournament is as hard to handicap as any we’ve ever seen. The top seeds are a nice mix of the new and the old — Ohio State hasn’t held so lofty a position in generations, and Florida, the defending champion, is a number one for the first time in school history. North Carolina and Kansas are the traditional powers occupying top seeds.

If nothing else, Duke gets a taste of what it’s like to be Cinderella, although few outside of Dick Vitale and Billy Packer will be cheering for them to put on the glass slipper. Rather, people will be looking at them as they would if they were the Yankees easing into the postseason as a wild-card. The sooner they lose, the better.

That’s quite a compliment to the Duke program, which occupies the same position in college basketball that Notre Dame does in college football and the Yankees and Cowboys fill in baseball and the NFL — the team that everybody either loves or hates but never ignores.

Duke should be honored. For people to celebrate their demise, they have to be great year after year after year, which they are. If they were to fall on hard times, they would become like the Yankees were from the mid-1960s until 1976 — a big name that forgot how to play the game. Beating the Yankees in those days wasn’t any more an accomplishment than beating Cleveland. There was no joy in it.

It was the same with Notre Dame until Charlie Weis took over and made them worth beating again. Even if you hate the flagship teams, you want them to be at least competent so that it means something when you take them down.

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