Mike Celizic

T.G.F.B. — Thank god for Belmont, the little school that almost could, the kind that puts the mad in the first round of March Madness.

You can ask for a lot in the first round of the NCAA’s annual hoops festival — big upsets, Cinderella stories, edge-of-the-seat excitement. But you can’t expect it. There’s a reason teams are seeded the way they are.

All you can really hope for is that a day of predictable results is broken up by one game that will go in your book of golden memories. Belmont darned near gave us the whole package — monster upset, Cinderella, etc. — and if the Bruins fell one point short of sending the exalted Dookies home, there’s no shame in that, nor does it diminish the thrill they gave us.

Belmont fit every definition of the kind of team that can grab our imagination by the collar and shake us out of the semi-comatose state a dedicated tournament viewer has fallen into by the twelfth game of a day that began at noon on the East Coast and at 9 a.m. on the West.

It’s the team that made you do a double-take when you saw it in the brackets. Belmont? You mean Duke is playing a racetrack in New York? Who’s leads the fast break, Secretariat?

It turns out that Belmont is the 21^st century’s answer to the old Princeton teams of Pete Carril. They’re tough and unflappable and have higher grade-point averages than just about everybody. And they give the big guys fits.

But they’re better than Princeton because, like George Mason a couple of years ago, they’re barely known to the public at large. That’s the perfect match-up, an unknown little school from an obscure conference playing — and torturing — one of the biggest names in the game.

The Wisconsin-Cal State Fullerton game was also a good one, but CBS hardly showed us any of it, and for good reason. It fit the bill in terms of a high seed against a low seed, but Wisconsin isn’t a legendary basketball program. No matter how high they’re seeded, they’re a Big Ten football school and nobody cares about them in basketball like they do about a Duke, North Carolina, UCLA, Georgetown or Kansas. Plus, everybody’s heard of Cal State Fullerton from its success in college baseball, so it doesn’t fit the role of the unknown upstart.

Belmont, though, is another matter. Based in Nashville and the proud alma mater of none other than Minnie Pearl, who made a career of providing comic relief at the Grand Old Opry and on “Hee-Haw,” Belmont is the powerhouse of the Atlantic Sun Conference, whatever that is. Not that many people noticed, but the Bruins were also making their third straight trip to the NCAA party, and this year, they acted as if they actually intended to win a game.

UCLA gets Hollywood stars in its crowd. Belmont had Vince Gill. And well before halftime, it had everybody who was watching at home, too. And while you watched, you realized that this is why Virginia tech and Arizona State should be at home watching a school they think they're better than giving Duke all that it could handle. The mid-majors don't often go deep in the tournament, but when they do, they provide the sort of thrills you can't get anywhere else.

In the East, the networks seem to have a rule that every second of every Duke game has to be inflicted on the viewing public. It’s one of the reasons that a lot of people don’t feel all warm and fuzzy inside when they see Mike Krzyzewski radiating genius from every pore on the sideline. As it is with Notre Dame, familiarity breeds if not contempt, at least annoyance, and it’s not helped by the rapturous rants of the broadcast crews about the sheer brilliance the Dookies employ in every detail of the game, right down to the way they tie their shoes.

So, when Duke-Belmont came on the air, I had a sinking feeling that I was going to have to sit through every painful moment of what I assumed would be a blowout. There was good reason to think that. Every other game up to then had ended predictably. There were a few that held your attention — Marquette-Kentucky was entertaining and reasonably tight down the stretch — but there wasn’t anything that grabbed you by the throat and wouldn’t let go.

And that’s what you sit through the first round for — one game that commands your attention, one game that’s going to make you accost everybody you know at work the following morning with the phrase, “Did you see. . .?!”

You watch because you don’t dare miss it when it happens.

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