“April is the cruellest month.” – T.S. Eliot

After a particularly brutal football loss by his beloved Georgia Bulldogs to rival squad Georgia Tech, legendary Atlanta-Journal Constitution columnist Lewis Grizzard once wrote, “Frankly, I don’t want to talk about it,” and left the remainder of his allotted column space blank in that day’s paper.

That takes a fair amount of gall and years of credibility to pull off. I have neither of those, so I decided I better give myself a week of recovery before writing about the end of this college basketball season.

This season was hyped up to be the bright, shining, golden season of basketball in the state of Alabama and somehow actually lived up to it. It only lacked a state team carrying its coach off the court after sinking a halfcourt shot at the buzzer for the national championship.

For a brief time midseason, Auburn was number one in the AP basketball poll while Alabama held the top perch in the coaches’ poll. Both teams were able to beat their rival this season when the rival was ranked number one.

The first matchup between the two teams also marked the only time in Southeastern Conference men’s basketball history when the number one and number two teams played each other as conference members.

Auburn and Alabama both beat up college basketball royalty like North Carolina and Kentucky and even clipped this season’s national runner-up in Houston. Unfortunately, neither team could crack the code of a couple of other elite teams in Duke and eventual national champion Florida.

For one state team to finish in the Elite Eight and the other in the Final Four while fanbases from both teams leave this season feeling a bit wistful their teams could not stay just a little longer at the Big Dance before turning into a pumpkin at midnight, shows what a special season this was.

We often hear the cliché about how sports imitate life, and I think it is valid. What you receive from a sports season often depends on what you put into it. This can go for the people directly involved with the team – such as the players, coaches and support staff – and also for the fans themselves.

On the other hand, what also make sports so wonderful is the elements come together like a great work of fiction.

As a fan, the deeper you go into the season, the more you get to know the players’ personalities and histories, how the team’s chemistry strengthens or deteriorates, and the peaks and valleys of the team’s performance.

These all come together to whisk you into a world outside the humdrum of your everyday life. As you connect with the players and coaches, they become the characters in the arc of your team’s story.

Also like a truly good story, you do not know what the end result will be until it arrives. The guys in the white hats don’t always come out on top, and even the most elite sports programs will have more seasons where they do not reach the mountaintop than where they do.

For me the sign of a great story is you are a little sad it is over no matter the final outcome. If my beloved Auburn Tigers had been able to pull off the impossible and win the national championship, I would have been walking on sunshine but also still felt a tinge of melancholy that this specific collection of players’ adventure is now over.

There will never be another team quite like this one which makes the present sad but also makes the future intriguing as we can now speculate about the program’s fate for next season.

Sports also resemble a good book because the end result does not have a significant impact on our real-world circumstances. Even though those villainous Gators took the title this year, our lives will continue in much the same way as they did before.

So this April brings basketball fans back to sober reality after spending most of March swimming in the heavens of the highest quality of basketball seen in our great state since people began nailing peach baskets to tall poles and tree trunks. We will remember these teams fondly as the years pass.

Perhaps if Grizzard had the luxury of a week’s time, he could have appreciated the 1984 Bulldogs ended the season with a 7-4 record that included an upset win over number two Clemson.

Or perhaps not. Restraint was not exactly his forte.