What's next, conducting office sweeps for tournament bracket printouts?

USA Today reported last week that some businesses are installing filtering tools that will prevent employees from watching NCAA tournament games on computers at work. The companies are concerned so many people will watch CBS' live streaming that the computer networks will slow to a crawl or, worse, crash.

They also are concerned nothing productive will get done for the next three weeks. And their point is?

If the sight of your 90-year-old Aunt Edna filling out her brackets isn't proof enough that the NCAA tournament is our national passion, then the computer-blocking should provide final evidence. Nothing in American sports beats the tournament for excitement and fan involvement. "Fan involvement" is a nice way of saying "rampant gambling," but there's more to it than that.

The tournament is a communal thing in the way the World Cup is, only with - gratuitous soccer insult coming! - more scoring and fewer riots. We agonize over our bracket picks. We try to make a case inside our heads that a 13th seed has a chance against a fourth seed because of a formula we have devised that gives more weight to programs with green uniforms.

We tell ourselves we're going to seed differently than the NCAA Selection Committee did simply because we know that nothing good can come out of a room of grown men locked together for hours on end and because we're pretty sure that when they should have been discussing the relative strength of the Big Ten, the men were dropping water balloons out a seventh-floor window.

Or we tell ourselves we're going to follow the committee's seedings because the last time we won a pool was in 1974.

The NCAA tournament has a grip on this country like no other sporting event.

The Super Bowl is a big one-day party preceded by two weeks of heartbreaking stories about a backup cornerback's sister who is serving time for credit-card fraud involving Amway products.

By rule, each World Series game must begin at 2 a.m.

The college football bowl season is a kind of all-you-can-eat affair that leaves you bloated.

The NBA playoffs fail to grab you by your lapels and demand your attention.

And hockey is hockey.

The NCAA tournament is our national get-together.

People who wouldn't ordinarily have anything to do with one another (or sports) sit shoulder-to-shoulder watching the excruciating final seconds of close games. They argue about who has made the better picks. They trash-talk about what they're going to do with their winnings - you know, if there were a few dollars involved. They are certain they know teams' strengths and weaknesses better than Jay Bilas does, and they might be correct.

One of the reasons some businesses want to block the live streaming of NCAA tournament games is because they know they face the prospect of seemingly catatonic employees staring at live action on their computers. But it only means the companies, if successful in their blockade, will face the prospect of seemingly catatonic employees staring at ESPN.com while scores are being updated. There is no way of stopping this. There is no cure for this disease.

What all of this shows is how big the tournament is and how deeply it is woven into our lives. Is it the games or the pools that attract us? Well, let's put it this way: Very few people outside of Nashville care about Belmont University, but you can bet (and, given the chance, you probably will) some supreme risk-takers will be paying keen attention to what the Bruins do in the first round.

The play-in game for the 64th spot is sort of like trying to decide who the most handsome Stooge is. But watch the beads of sweat on your co-worker's forehead as she tries to decide whether the information she has received on a player's high ankle sprain is credible for that game.

The tournament is our national gathering place. There's a seat for everybody. There's a pool for everybody, too, provided a person is employed or, short of that, breathing.

No, this is as good as it gets.

A Tribune story Friday said that online tournament pools involving Facebook might come under scrutiny from law-enforcement officials. Everything seems to have Internet implications these days, and the NCAA tournament is no different. But it and the anti-streaming tool raise a serious question:

How long before possession of brackets becomes a felony?

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