From Way Downtown, i.e. Jamaica Plain via Ithaca, N.Y.

Stop the virtual presses for a "Secret Knowledge of Backroads" first: A guest author! My friend Allison, who's been referenced in these pages a handful of times before, was so excited by her alma mater Cornell's success in the NCAA tournament this month that she had to write something here. (I jokingly invited her to pen something. In her euphoria, she immediately said yes.) And now, drum rolls and Allison:

"HEY SPORTSFANS.

"My name is Allison, Cornell University class of 2005, and Aaron has offered me the honor of a guest spot on his blog today. Actually, he might have been kidding, but too bad! You might remember me from my other appearances on this blog, like the time he invited me to contribute a few words about Beach House; if you learned what Snell's Window was that day, well, you're welcome! Another time, he called me out for skipping all his sports posts and only reading the ones about indie rock. Funnily enough, though, I'm here today to talk about none other than BASKETBALL.

"Here's the thing: Cornell's basketball team is really good this year and most of us totally don't know what to do about it. We're beside ourselves with a weird new excitement. We're frantically studying up on teams we haven't paid attention to all season. We're calling our dads and actually having something to talk to them about. We're wearing Cornell shirts and yelling in sports bars (and then turning to each other and whispering things like, 'Wait, what's the deal with the shot clock again?')

"It's not like I never paid attention to NCAA hoops. I grew up in Connecticut (former home of the Whale [editor's note: as proof of Allison's unfamiliarity with sports, the team was actually the Hartford Whalers], current home of nothing besides UConn basketball), so March Madness was always a serious deal. My family's sort-of-friendly bracket contest was usually dominated by the team of my dad, who knew a lot about basketball, and my little sister, who liked 'Gonzaga' because it reminded her of the Muppets. No matter what, it was always UConn for the win.

"But the bracket is a strange place this year. On Sunday, Cornell advanced to the Sweet 16, foundering fourth-seeded Wisconsin under so many points that the second half of the game wasn't even interesting enough to televise. Meanwhile, UConn, after a season that doesn't bear talking about, quietly rolled over and died in some sad post-season invitational game. (I'm talking about the UConn men, of course--the women are super boring these days, having just set a record for winning the most games in a row of any team in any sport in the history of time.)

"While I was at Cornell I attended maybe five sporting events. One of them, in 2001, was a men's basketball game versus Princeton, at Princeton. I sat in the home section, wore a red shirt, yelled "go Big Red!" once in my girly little voice and got personally chanted at to 'SIT DOWN, YOU SUCK! SIT DOWN, YOU SUCK!' by almost everyone in the arena. So I did, because we sucked.

"I didn't think we had that much to be ashamed of, though. Princeton was the Ivy League champion that year. Some years they'd even show up in first round of the bracket like a novelty act and generate a little chatter about their 'intellectual' style of play. When Cornell made it into the first round of the tournament last year it was similarly adorable. I admit I'd almost forgotten it had even happened.

"Nobody's talking about Cornell's intellectual style right now. This isn't some ragged gang of engineering geeks throwing the competition for a loop with secret Rube Goldberg plays based on complex trigonometry. They're just plain good, and they don't look one bit surprised about it. They like to start out bold on offense early in the game, and then never let up; Temple and Wisconsin never recovered. Their passing: psychic. Their three-pointers: swoosh.

"Cornell plays number-one seeded Kentucky tonight at Syracuse, which is the next best thing to a home game. They could win, you guys. I know, right? This is totally weird."