You're not really a superhero until you prove you can dodge a bullet, which is what UCLA did tonight against Texas A&M.

I found myself back at the Honda Center in Anaheim for Round 2 of March Madness.  I was in my usual spot, Row EE, seat #7, just five rows back from the band.  I wore black, instead of Bruin blue and gold, because I didn't want to be accosted again by the cheerleaders.  You can see how they were trying to search me out, but when I set my mind to it, I'm like a shadow:




I found out why the UCLA band ended up facing us in the second half of Thursday night's game.  The L.A. Times missed the story, but Steve Dilbeck reported in the Daily Breeze that UCLA coach Ben Howland complained to the tournament officials, saying that his team couldn't hear him talk during the timeouts.  Turns out putting your band and your players on adjacent corners of the court can be problematic.  In any case, it made me feel good to find this out.  It means that the headaches and tinnitus that have plagued me since that game can be chalked up as my taking one for the team.  I've done my part to get the Bruins to San Antonio for the Final Four.

After our long weekend together, I feel a closeness with the UCLA band and they seem to have grown fond of me.  My black outfit today give me a hip, musician's vibe that they really responded to.  My buddy Jason, in fact, handed me his trombone for a moment, and he didn't seem at all surprised when I shredded through the first stanza of "Sons of Westwood" (clarinet version here and ukulele version here).




Epiphany - Sure, basketball careers are brought to sudden halts during March Madness, but who stops to think about what this all means to the band?  What the hell do you do with a trombone after graduation?  How tough is it to walk away when you've played that thing under the sacred banners of Pauley Pavillion and marched with it across the hallowed turf of the Rose Bowl?   As I stewed over these questions I realized that we all develop skills and passions that we can't carry with us into the real world.  Whether it's hacky-sack, like my friend Wes loved, or mushroom trips like my buddy Craig was wont to take, we all have to walk away from something.  It's a shame that, when you get a job, you can't horse around for twelve weeks and then tell your boss not to worry because you know how to pull an all-nighter.   But life forces us to jettison old talents and master new ones.  The great unspoken truism of this basketball tournament, where every game ends with senior players lying face down on the floor, crying like colicky infants, is that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.  This holds true for basketball players, band members and beer-bongers.