Start Xeroxing those brackets, strike up the Siena fight song, tell the boss you're taking a long lunch: 65 teams and 65 reasons that prove this is the best basketball month of the year

Lady Vol coach Pat Summitt wears a cheerleading uniform while singing "Rocky Top" during a timeout. Wade Payne/AP

• REACT: What are your favorite?

1. Bill Raferty's voice at high noon on the first day.

2. Freshmen like Michael Beasley, Eric Gordon, Kevin Love, O.J. Mayo and Derrick Rose are dancing instead of grinding out their first NBA season.

3. Friendly wagers between state governors. In 2005 Washington's Christine Gregoire bet Montana's Brian Schweitzer a box of Fuji apples that her No. 1-seeded Washington Huskies would beat his 16th-seeded Montana Grizzlies. Gregoire won eight rib steaks.

4. Wall-to-wall basketball. The first Thursday and Friday might as well be national holidays -- enough people skip work to make them one -- with games starting as early as 9:30 a.m. PT and ending as late as 1 a.m. ET.

5. The most infectious fight song in all of sports, Tennessee's Rocky Top. We'll be hearing it a lot.

6. SI's All-Brainiac Tourney Team: Drake's Adam Emmenecker, a former walk-on turned Missouri Valley Player of the Year, gets to show the nation that smart guys can also ball. Emmenecker isn't the only player whose GPA is as rarified as his team's RPI.

D.J. Augustin
Texas, guard, 3.64, Education

Drew Streicher
Butler, forward, 3.95, Chemistry (MBA)

Adam Emmenecker
Drake, guard, 3.97, Business and Finance

Justin Hare
Belmont, guard, 3.87, Exercise Science (Pre-Med)

Alex Ruoff
West Virginia, guard, 3.79, History

7. The Cheerleader Cattiness Quotient. Few things are more amusing than watching spirit squads talk smack about their rah-rah rivals -- or to opposing players, a la UCLA cheerleaders versus Joakim Noah at the '06 Final Four.

8. The 5 vs. 12 game. Wyoming over Virginia in 1987. Wisconsin-Green Bay over Cal in '94. Pacific over Providence in 2004. You can almost always count on a No. 12 seed (or three) springing a first-round upset over a No. 5. In fact, in only three seasons (1988, 2000 and last year) since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985 has a fifth seed not gone down in the first round. This year it'll be Western Kentucky over Drake.

9. Even your grandma is in an office pool. And she nails all the 8-9 games.

10. Tournament games are now broadcast for free, on the Internet, assuring that those fans who haven't traveled to regionals, vacationed in Vegas or simply played hooky from their jobs are still completely unproductive at work.

11. The MEAC team's band. The best performance from the low-major conference's representative often comes at halftime.

12. The "live look-in" at a game that is tied with two minutes left.

13. The voice of CBS's Gus Johnson rising three octaves and 40 decibels as he narrates that frantic finish.

14. (Temple swingman Dionte) Christmas arriving nine months early.

15. The reaction of the bench scrubs when one of their own drills a three-pointer right in front of them.

16. The BCS = autocracy. March Madness = democracy.

17. The football-obsessed state of Tennessee has six teams in the Big Dance -- the Vols and Lady Vols, Memphis, Vanderbilt, Austin Peay and Belmont.

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