Madness

In this case, March Madness, a term used to describe the annual NCAA basketball tournament. My alma mater suffered a heartbreaking one point loss last night, ending a rather improbable run that started with four straight wins in the B1G tournament resulting in a B1G tournament championship, followed by two more wins in the NCAA tournament including a stunning tournament upset over #2 seeded Louisville.

The beginning of that run coincided with an incident involving my college basketball team in an aborted plane takeoff where the plane ended up leaving the runway, skidding across the airport, through a fence, and almost ending up in a ravine. The head coach gave the team the option of forfeiting the tournament, or trying to fly in the next morning. The team voted to travel and play, and the more they won, the more they began to attract the attention of the national media, who began to cover the story of how this near tragedy had had a galvanizing effect on the team.

This morning I saw a tweet from one of the players:

                                     STILL ALIVE

I just remember thinking two things:

How glad I am to be alive.

And how glad I am to go to Michigan.

And that got me thinking. Maybe my mentor was right in that I really hadn't come to grips with the fact that I almost died. It's a scary thing, but on the other side, there really hasn't been any gratitude. Not reminding myself everyday that it's great to still be alive might be the maddest thing of all.