Men's basketball champ will be …

OK, sports fans, here is my call for the much-anticipated NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

The Final Four has been set. I have had next to zero interest in this March Madness malarkey. I say “next to zero” only because one team from my home state of Oregon was in the tournament at the beginning.

The Oregon Ducks beat BYU in the first round, then lost to Wisconsin in the second round. Wisconsin? Oh, yeah, the Badgers are one of the Final Four teams.

Back to that in a moment.

The other three are Connecticut, Florida and Kentucky.

I do not follow college basketball the way I follow college football. Don’t misunderstand, I’m no expert on either sport. I played a little high school freshman football a hundred or so years ago, but I cannot pretend to know much about the nuances of the game.

But I do follow the Ducks, the Oregon State Beavers and on rare occasions I like to watch the University of Washington Huskies.

Who’ll win the NCAA men’s basketball championship?

My unscientific, unknowing and uneducated pick will be Wisconsin.

Why? Because I want the Ducks of the University of Oregon to have some meager bragging right to having lost their tournament bid to the eventual national champions.

I have an extended family connection to Wisconsin as well. My wife’s Aunt Margaret lives in Kenosha, as does my wife’s cousin Tom; another of my wife’s cousins, Joanne, lives in Milwaukee.

OK, there you have it.

I will retain my virtual non-interest in the tournament, except for “rooting” — if you want to call it that — for the Oregon Ducks to look back and say, “Hey, we lost to the best team in the country.”