March Madness 2025: A real Cinderella story

By Jack Walker

First and foremost, it is absolutely paramount to note: this bracketology and its corresponding literature that you’re observing at this moment was written prior to the start of the 2025 NCAA Tournament, with only the strength of mind and intuition available at the very first glance and word. Moreover, no resources, research or advanced technology, served to bolster the process formed in predicting the outcomes of the games.

Jack Walker

With that being said, I stand by this mantra humbly in both victory and defeat: “Fortune favors the bold and chance favors those who persist.”

I cannot credit any certain individual for the aforementioned, but I do remember reading it on a motivational poster somewhere inside a public restroom, somewhere not far from a basketball court, where an aspiring college basketball player devotedly shot countless free throws practicing his craft, because that’s what Division I caliber players do!

And surely not far from that public restroom that basketball cap, somewhat mediocre level sports writers with mainstream aspirations find ways to hone their own skill and maneuver around the past-deadline, early edition snares that would discourage and abstract elite, big-shot sportswriters from doing this exact thing, are this exact moment – not because they’re not gifted – but because they’re not as gifted – and make no mistakes about it.

As bold as a remark that may be, it is what it is and chance favors those who persist — so only the bona-fide dreamer sends hand-penned sports articles — with hand-penned 68-team brackets predicting every single game all the way to the Final Four and National Championship, despite the facts that this article would appear long after the tournament was over and accommodating the captivating substance and long run-on sentences with more than lackluster grammar and composition reflecting, provided the lack of resources and advanced technology available.

Only pure, clean gusto fuels this mighting assertion that I thought that the 2025 Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament would feature a few major upsets; Liberty, Virginia Commonwealth University and maybe Saint Johns as a Final Four team, but not too much on the Cinderella hashtags, if you follow the people every year.

And to add to the pandemonium and traditional madness the title game was more of an Iron Bowl than the usual gridiron classic at the end of the football season with Tornado Alley’s prolific divas that corral all the athletic enthusiasm north of the Atlantic-Eastern Coastline; hashtag: CLASH of the T-I-T-A-N-S! (Get it? TIGERS and the TIDE) I thought it was clever and none of that matters. (Sigh, deep breath)

But what does matter is the UCLA Lady Bruins – my pick to have won the Women’s Tournament over juggernaut UCONN and the indomitable South Carolina Lady – yeah…

And this is what that is: and fortunately for anyone reading this, you can describe it any way you want.

Either way, I did my best, hoping it would get published in the newspaper – and I know that chance favors those who persist and fortune favors the bold and every March Madness – somewhere… There’s a Cinderella story.

Cheers. – Jack Walker