SOONER OR TAITER: NCAA in Buenos Aires? Ay Caramba!

Finally, the NCAA Tournament is over.

I write this with the utmost relief.

Critics and professional sports writers thought this year’s tournament a comparative dud, devoid of drama and first-round upsets. An Elite Eight that featured three No.1 vs. No. 2 matchups and a No. 1 vs. No. 3 game gave little momentum or substance to feel-good stories about underdogs and the growing parity in college basketball.

That, however, has little to do with my delight at the Tournament’s conclusion.

I’ve spent much of the past three weeks hunting down internet connections and sports bars in Buenos Aires, Argentina, doing my best to keep up with a tournament whose import and fan base lies almost exclusively in the United States.

I’ve watched a few blurry games on a laptop prone to freezing due to a consistently interrupted feed. I’ve squinted at 14-inch televisions streaming an internet broadcast of five multi-colored blobs morphing up the court without regard for who is whom and whether the ball (a blurry orange sphere resembling the old “ball on fire” trick that made the antiquated “NBA Jams” video game such a classic) finds the bottom of the net.

I’ve even resorted to listening to online radio broadcasts inside WiFi cafés in Buenos Aires, frightening other (normal) patrons with random fist-pumps or involuntary gasps at plays like Ron Lewis’ three-pointer to send Ohio St. and Xavier into overtime.

Throughout this year’s NCAA Tournament, I’ve felt entirely cut off from sports’ most original and passionate event – a three-week odyssey into the quintessential euphoria and tragedy of athletics.

Its closest rival in intensity, ecstasy and heartbreak is the World Cup, but the quadrennial soccer tournament lacks the year-to-year drama that sees teams swing from No. 1 and No. 2 seeds to No. 7 and No. 8s fighting for second-round upsets of traditional rivals.

Most of all, the World Cup is without the most crucial element that separates the NCAA Tournament from all other stages in amateur and professional sports.

The people winning and losing these games are barely removed from adolescence and have not yet assumed the steely, indifferent faces of seasoned professional athletes.

The NCAA Tournament is much more prone to the Adam Morrison displays of 2006 – the agonizing and involuntary tears and emotional hugs between coaches and departing seniors.

Why is that? Why is the NCAA Tournament so unique in its unabashed outpouring of frustration and triumph? In other sporting events, why are there so few displays like the famous Bryce Drew bellyflop after sending Ole Miss home with a buzzer beater?

After three weeks of agonizingly peripheral contact with the NCAA Tournament, I’ve come to a few conclusions.

In the international world of sports, there remain few outlets for college athletes to attain the fame and renown so common to the NCAA Tournament. There are no Christian Laettner moments or Tyus Edney heroics; the international college arena is a small, informal and anonymous one.

My international travels have taught me that highly competitive college sports are a predominantly American phenomenon.

In Argentina, college teams are like intramural teams, composed of all those who want to play and lacking the discipline and intensity we expect of college teams in the United States. The everybody-can-play rule is in full effect, and games between schools are like friendly scrimmages.

College sports fall by the wayside in the global hunt for talent at the youngest of ages. The US is hardly innocent in this quest—one need only think of pre-pubescent Olympic gymnasts, the Freddy Adu craze, and 15-year old swimming phenoms—but both college football and college basketball have somewhat resisted the urge to uncover the Fountain of Youth.

Globally, the best soccer players are hunted out well before they are old enough to worry about going to college. Brazil provides the best example, with its surfeit of young talent that crops up every four years, but even England reveals its newly minted teenage prodigy at every World Cup.

The world’s best swimmers, gymnasts, runners, and baseball players almost all join the professional ranks as adolescents.

By the time they’re 20, many of them have seen one Olympic Games, maybe two. College is already out of the question, made illegal after an athlete decides to join the professional ranks.

Most importantly, college competition is often seen as an obstacle to development and improvement. Minor technicalities like class time, playing with teammates of inferior skill, and other collegiate distractions deter such athletes from a stint at a university.

The NCAA Tournament, by contrast, offers a stage to those amateur athletes whose majority will never reach the heights of the professional ranks. For most, there will be no appearance in the Olympics, big contract, or long athletic career.

That does little to diminish the passion of the Tournament. Anybody who took the bus to Hartford to watch the Harvard women battle Maryland knows that.

Perhaps more than any other event, the NCAA Tournament is sport for sport’s sake – a lucrative event, certainly, but also one that showcases the talents of those incapable of ditching school for 10-hour training days at age 15.

With the exception of the 18-going-on-80 Greg Oden, there are few—if any—Zinedine Zidanes in the NCAA Tournament. How many 19-year-old kids could walk by the NCAA Tournament Trophy, seconds after committing an ignominious act condemning his team to a certain loss, with the expression of a person on an afternoon stroll?

Not many.

And that’s what elevates the NCAA Tournament over the World Cup, the Olympics, and any other global sporting event. And that same quality confines it to a US audience grown accustomed to the thrill of an event played by those amateur athletes whose mistakes often carry more import than their brilliance (see Chris Webber’s timeout in the 1993 Final Four).

At the same time that the NCAA Tournament consumes the US for a month every spring, it remains obscure throughout an international world unimpressed by and unaccustomed to college athletics.

Only in the NCAA Tournament does an amateur athlete get so much exposure for being just that.

So it was only natural that I reacted with an open-mouthed stare when I looked up to see Ohio State playing Florida in perfect, high-definition fashion at an upscale restaurant in Buenos Aires on Monday night.

Finally, after seven weeks in Argentina, I was home.

—Staff writer Aidan E. Tait can be reached at atait@fas.harvard.edu.