The biggest, most important college basketball day of the season for us talking heads at ESPN is Selection Sunday. It is such an important day that our bosses at the Worldwide Leader momentarily put down their post multimartini lunch cigars for a brief moment to decide whether to rubber stamp the additional expense for Rece Davis, Seth Greenberg, LaPhonso Ellis and me to have coach seats on a Greyhound bus to Bristol, Connecticut, direct from the ACC tournament, in favor of the added expense of allowing us to Uber some 30 miles to our drafty, musty motel to get some much-needed shuteye after an exhausting Champ Week schedule.
Of course, our frugal bosses invariably choose to save the $20 and place us on the Dirty Dog, but due to their long deliberation over the decision, we are the very last passengers to board the already moving bus, and the only remaining seats are next to crying babies and a chatty cowboy with a guitar.
Yet, due to our boundless love of the game, we gladly board the Screaming Baby Express for the overnight trip, ingesting exhaust fumes and tripping over dirty diapers — both adult and child.
When we finally arrive at the ESPN campus in Bristol as the sun comes up on Selection Sunday, we are bleary-eyed, disheveled and weakened without food and water for over 12 hours of nonstop travel on the Dirty Dog.