This year, for the first time in 11 years, Wright State University is in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.

Wright State is one of two home-town teams for Scaiaholics. The other is the more successful and, as a result, less hilarious University of Dayton.

Wright State was sent to Dallas for its first round game today [a game that is technically being played right now, so I may get distrac–come on! How is that charging?!]

Several high school associates attended Wright State, so some of my favorite nights I have no recollection of occurred on campus. When I heard the Raiders [and I felt bad because I had to ask the first Wright State shirt-clad person I saw for a reminder on the team’s nickname] were coming to Dallas, I cooked up a reason to go to the American Airlines Center.

Wright State, I explained, quite reasonably, was the first team scheduled to practice.

So I wandered into the AAC and was filled with hometown pride.

The band was playing as I wandered in and the team was taking the court. There, several fans were surrounding the entrance.

I walked up and started chatting with them about ending a tournament drought.

“I’m from Dayton, but I went to Ball State,” I explained… again and again… to every person I saw. “We have our own tournament drought.”

The first time I said that, I had to look up Ball State’s last trip. The Fightin’ Cardinals had gone to the tournament my freshman year in 2000. We all gathered to watch, thinking that’s how it’d be every year.

Then I graduated, having never seen another NCAA tournament game. But I had thought they had a good stretch somewhere along the way. It turns out, I was thinking of the time the football team was good, not the basketball team.

In my defense, the football team was quite terrible when I was a student. The Fightin’ Football Cardinals didn’t win their first game until I was a sophomore. I suspect that was the only time in history a rush of students took down the goal posts to celebrate a win against Miami of Ohio.

But back to Wright State: the fans were eager to talk to a fellow Daytonian. I was quite pleased with this soundbite and ensured it was played quite frequently. “We ALL tell ’em about Dayton,” I tweeted after speaking to this gentleman.

One woman said she was having a great trip because everyone in the Big City was being so nice. She was staying at a hotel near the Galleria, so I told her if she likes the fancy-pants part of town, the down-home real-ness of Fort Worth would be even better [I may not have used those exact words, but I did explain quite clearly that Fort Worth is much more Dayton-ly than Dallas].

Chatting with fans at the AAC led to the same exchanges multiple times. I was asked, because a guy wearing a media badge is probably some kind of expert, who I expected to win the tournament. The first time that happened, I felt like a sucker because I had no clue which team I had picked in any brackets.

“I’m pretty sure Kansas is in there somewhere,” I explained.

In conclusion, I feel like the Wright State pep band could spend less time spelling things.