I recently checked my NCAA basketball tournament brackets– you know, the ones that were supposed to make me rich beyond my wildest dreams and completely irresistible to women?Yeah, that one– and was more than pleasantly surprised at one of them.

As it turns out, my Fox Sports bracket was doing better than 99.6% of all the brackets out there. If I believed in jinxes, which I do not, I would have thought that I jinxed myself. That was as good as it got for my bracket.

After that, my brackets went in a direction decidedly warm and southward in a handbasket. Three of my Final Four teams lost, including the team I had pegged to win it all. The team a LOT of people had marked to win it all– Michigan State. They lost. So did my runner-up, Michigan.

So, I won’t be rollin’ in a Rolls Royce or Maserati anytime soon. But I had fun filling out my brackets. And at least I got this far before my brackets busted. Unlike most of my efforts in the past.

For those of you who don’t follow sports, it means that the world didn’t end. I didn’t have any money to bet on these games, so I didn’t lose any. Not that I would EVER have bet money on sports, says the good Baptist boy.

Nothing will happen to me other than maybe me being knocked down a rung or two on the ol’ ladder of my sports pride.

I’ll be back next year, filling out as many brackets as humanly possible and basing all my picks on gut instinct and my sportly intuition. Which loosely translated looks a lot like eeny-meeny-miney-moe. . . .

I have no illusions about having a perfect bracket. I just hope my championship pick doesn’t lose in the first round.