Well, that’s my bracket busted then.

My day started out just fine…great weather and a canceled afternoon-long meeting led me to hit the Real Sports Bar early. I emailed my team back at the office, telling them all to go home, and staked out a spot for CBJ+M (and, eventually, Nellie). We landed decent spots with a good view of the 2-acre TV. The fuzzy picture below just doesn’t do it justice. Just for scale, the smaller screens to the right and left are actually composite screens made of four 42″ plasmas each.

The food was decent for a sports bar, if rather overpriced (much like their neighbour, E11even). The beer list was entirely pedestrian, and it got a little douchebaggy later in the evening (douchebags are easy to spot, by the way: they drink Bud Light from those cobalt blue bottles), but there’s no question that it’s a great place to watch sports. There are screens everywhere, including over each urinal in the privy. We had a free round sent over by some friends at another table, and reciprocated with tequila shots; thankfully the niceness arms race stopped there. We were also about to place an order for medium chicken wings when our server showed up, asking if we would like a free order of medium chicken wings which had accidentally been ordered for someone else. Either we were very lucky, or we were momentarily able to make things appear at our table just by thinking about them. I tried thinking about Mila Kunis carrying a bottle of 1982 Chateau Margaux but it didn’t work. Still, we were having pretty good luck and enjoying ourselves a great deal.

But then things went from bad (Ohio beating Michigan) to worse (my Duke Blue Devils losing to #15 seed Lehigh). The nuclear-level problem was Missouri losing to Norfolk State; I had Mizzou going to the final four. Granted, so did a lot of other people in my pool, but my day overall — 5 and 11, after going 13 and 3 the day before — shot me to the bottom quarter of the standings.

Nellie, on the other hand, is near the top. She always does better in the pool than I do; I should just stop entering and save myself the $20 each year.