Yes, it had happened once again: Bracketile dysfunction. If only they made pills for this.

Four days in, and my for entertainment purposes only NCAA Tournament office pool entry had made the quick descent from the annual anticipatory madness to March badness. The Hoyas, my pick to cut down the nets in San Antonio, will instead be slicing up their TV dinners while watching the Final Four at home like the rest of us.

What makes it hurt even more is to be informed that I'm tied for the lead in a online contest with a group of friends and second in my office pool, all for naught. It's my rare moment in the sun before inevitably flaming out to a lower-division finish.

And believe me, hearing "You'd really be doing great, but Georgetown really killed you," doesn't help. That's an awfully big "but." Unless every No. 1 seed gets knocks out on Thursday or Friday and Western Kentucky wins the national title, I'm toast.

It has now been 15 years of futility in my office pool career. Despite carrying the word "sports" somewhere in my job title for that entire time span, I've yet to even dent the top five in the final standings.

In the time I've been offering up my "expert" predictions, I've watched receptionists, secretaries, advertising sales reps and even my wife (gulp, twice) take home the big prize. Talk about hard to swallow.

Explaining to your 8-year-old son why mom knows more about college basketball than you do can be quite the humbling conversation one that usually ends with me saying, "Isn't it almost your bed time?"

There was one glorious year back in my early days as a pup reporter at the Hastings Tribune. Yeah baby, I was in the thick of it. I had the entire final four, only to spend what I now refer to as "Black Saturday" listening to my teams go 0-2 amid the static of a car radio outside a wedding reception for whom I can no longer recall.

The losses, however, they stick with you.

Should I ever be stupid enough to participate in another NCAA Tournament pool, I'm trying to look back and analyze where I've gone wrong. My strategy has always been to mostly go with the chalk, but pick a slightly off-the-beaten-path national champion. The premise was that if I could latch onto the right underdog team, I'd gain an advantage over the annual North Carolina-, Duke-, Kansas-, UCLA-pickers of the world.

An idiotic approach, obviously. Only took me a decade and a half to figure it out.

Next year, I swear I'm going to enter an all-chalk bracket with every higher seed winning. Things couldn't be any worse than they have been every other year, could they?

The worst part of it all is the annual walk of shame. You know, that embarrassing trek you have to make into your office when you feel like everyone's giggling under their breath because your bracket has bit the dust three days short of the not-so-Sweet 16.

Truth is, most of them are probably too concerned about their own bracket crisis than mine, especially those who had Duke or Pittsburgh inked in for the Final Four and are now doomed to certain failure. Welcome to my world.