Every year, the NCAA Tournament delights millions of basketball fans and infuriates millions of soap opera viewers, whose favorite daily dramas are replaced by the games.

The following is offered as a brief overview of college basketball and its signature tournament, for non-fans of the game.

Basketball was invented when Dr. James Naismith, a gym instructor in Massachusetts, while looking for another way to punish his students besides sit-ups and push-ups, came up with the idea of ​​nailing a basket of peaches to the wall and doing to try to throw him a ball. When Naismith saw that his bored pupils were actually enjoying the exercise, he tried to dismiss it, too late.

“Basketball” became very popular, and the result was the Great New England Peach Famine, as every basket available to harvest the crop was used in the new regional pastime.

Over time, Naismith came to terms with the “sport” and made such notable changes as reducing the number of players per side (from 60 or 70 to five), instituting the “dribble” and banning street shoes in the gym.

From there, the game took off and became a staple at YMCAs and schools across the country. Universities began to form teams and build stadiums, as it was discovered that a surprising number of people were not only tearing themselves into their underwear shooting a ball at a basket, but paying to watch other people do it.

College basketball flourished in the 1930s and 1940s, and a national tournament was instituted. The game was evolving from the industrious creature that was Naismith’s brainchild to the fast-paced madness that it is today. Despite several scandals, the game steadily grew in popularity, being played before large and appreciative crowds, particularly in places like New York where the fans were very colorful and intelligent, clapping and cheering vigorously for one team or another, depending on the point.

Postseason tournaments and the crowning of a national champion became really interesting things when television came on the scene. Millions watched every spring, despite the fact that the same team, UCLA, won every year. And the tournament has been growing year after year. There are now 64 teams participating and proposals have been put forward to allow everyone to enter, regardless of history. The prospect is daunting, not only for soap opera fans, but also for basketball purists, for what about the reward element for a season well played?

But in college basketball, as in everything else, money talks, and besides, given enough publicity, there will always be an audience for a tournament game, no matter how mediocre the participants.

Meanwhile, Dr. Naismith would have a hard time recognizing his son today. Basketball has gone from the musty gloom of the YMCA to the glow of huge arenas. The players run like gazelles and soar over the basket like great birds, scoring with ridiculous ease. In Naismith’s conception of the game, scoring was supposed to be difficult, even impossible. The baskets were high above the players’ heads, the balls were crooked and sometimes larger than the baskets, and the players were encumbered by the many layers of clothing they had to wear in Victorian times.

But most of all, Naismith would be horrified by the emphasis on winning at all costs. While he viewed basketball as a gentleman’s game, today’s young men’s coaches lurk on the bench with hate and fury in their eyes, and every tournament game is a seething cauldron of emotions: anger, love, elation, despair. . Something like a soap opera.