Durham, NC — Saying that he was almost glad that he didn’t get in off the wait list at Dartmouth or Cornell, Braden McEwing, Duke University junior, told reporters yesterday that the fun provided by his school’s basketball team made him feel okay that he did not go to an Ivy League school.

“Maybe the connections aren’t quite what they would be at Princeton or somewhere, but you can’t beat the excitement of March Madness at Duke,” he said. “Having a basketball program that you can count on to go deep in the NCAA tournament every year makes it all even out.”

Having structured his entire high school experience around his parents’ expectation that he would follow in the footsteps of his older sister, Meghan, who graduated from Harvard last spring, McEwing said that he was initially disappointed when he realized that he would end up at Duke, but soon came around to the idea that the school’s balance of athletics with academics would be “more enjoyable, anyway.”

He reiterated that sentiment last night, on the eve of Duke’s first-round matchup against fourteen-seeded Mercer University, right after his sister texted him excited that Harvard had won its own first-round game.

“Sure, there was that freak loss to Lehigh a couple of years ago, but Duke basketball is a consistent contender,” thought the man who is working a consulting internship at Deloitte and not McKinsey this summer. “This year, who knows–we have a team that could make the Final Four or maybe even go all the way.”

The same evening, Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski told reporters that he felt okay for never pursing a coaching career in the NBA because, “When you have a post-season tradition like we do, it’s hard not to feel like you’re in the place where you belong.”

CHAPEL HILL, NC — Commenting on his odd behavior in the last few weeks,  friends and classmates described UNC sophomore Skyler Currybottom, who is in fact addled by crippling psychotic disorders, as “just another fan swept up in March Madness.”

“He’s just like any other real basketball fan,” said Currybottom’s suitemate Tripp Mitchell, “I think we all go a little nuts this time of a year.”

Mitchell said he first noticed that Currybottom “was a real fan,” on Tuesday night, when he came upon a large branching emblem smeared in a dark, viscous substance on the wall of their Morrison common room.

“I remember saying, ‘Dope bracket bro, who ya got going all the way?’ He said something about the devils caught in the sun of life, so I guess he meant Arizona State. What a weird pick,” Mitchell recalled.

Trisha Verlader, who sat next to Currybottom in their Econ 101 lecture on Monday, said she noticed the haggard, unshaven student furiously scribbling what appeared to be complex statistical calculations and repeated mantras during class, with dozens of ESPN tabs open on his laptop in front of him.

“He filled up two binders in one class, writing line after line of numbers and symbols,” said Verlader. “I guess he’s a real stats fanatic. I sure wouldn’t want to be in his bracket pool.”

Coming back to their dorm Wednesday night, Chris Tezler, Currybottom’s roommate, found the sophomore curled in the corner with a pair of scissors and hundreds of copies of a Daily Tar Heel issue featuring Marcus Paige on the cover.

“He was cutting out all the mouths, taping them to the floor to spell out ‘FIRST,'” said Tezler. “I guess we all have our superstitious rituals before game time. I couldn’t agree more: Paige needs to step it up in the first half.”

According to Campus Health, dismissing madness as March Madness is not uncommon .

“The best way of discerning between March Madness and actual madness is showing the friend, family member, or loved one clips of Dick Vitale and seeing how they react,” said Sara Stahlman, Campus Health official. “People afflicted by March Madness and no other ailment usually yell at the screen and storm out of the room while those with serious mental diseases nod along in agreement to what Vitale says.”

March Madness has arrived and the UNC men’s basketball team is set to compete in the NCAA tournament. Working on special assignment for The Minor, North Korean college basketball analyst Jin Mee Kim, veteran Pyongyang journalist and recipient of the 2007 Kim Jong-Il Award for Transcendent Writing in the Glorification of  the Workers’ Party of Korea, will offer his insights and perspectives on the Tar Heels as the team looks to advance through the bracket.  

Jin Mee Kim | The Minor

After a resplendent and toilsome 32-0 season, the Tar Heel Basketball Juggernaut marches into March Madness with it heart full of divine fire and its soul brimming with glory. Rumors of inconsistent play, weakness of free throw shooting, and off-court problems are salacious and untrue. They are spread by the conniving and imperial agents of Duke and its allies, who are destined to be destroyed in their gluttonous, New-Jersey bred perversion. Can UNC be defeated by its scheming and derelict enemies? Quite not. The players are too skillful! The fatherland of Chapel Hill is too bounteous! The spirit of Great Leader Roy Williams, who is well known to have sprung full-grown from the loins of Eternal Coach Dean Smith, is too powerful! Victory is assured so long as the labor and pure wishes of the people are with the Leader. The Mightful Tar Heels’ match-up for the opening round of competition is expectantly analyzed below, along with match-ups against the futile opponents UNC is expected to come against in the following two rounds. Read so that you may acquaint yourself with the predestined triumph.

Round 1: UNC vs. Providence

The Match-up: It is true that the Providence Friars have pleaded surrender before this contest, so sure are they to be irreparably shattered by the Blue Fist of Righteousness. In the wisdom of Competition, this earnest entreaty was denied by Roy Williams, Who Whispers in the Ears of Mountains and Makes Them Chuckle with Delight. Denizens of the accursed and dying Big East, Providence enters this game woefully ill-suited to a contest of basketball: with only a six-man rotation and a 42.6 field-goal percentage, which is a full 57.4 percentage points below that of UNC.

Prediction: UNC: 347 Providence: 7

Round 2: UNC vs. Iowa State

The Match-up: Roy Williams, The Great Sun of the Tar Heel Nation, has said of the Cyclones: “only upon the head of a pig could a three-seed be more undeservedly given.” Under the hapless lead of Fred “The Child” Hoiberg, Iowa State has a defense of weakness and futility, allowing 73.9 points per game. So vigorously is Marcus Paige expected rain three pointers on the Cyclones that the opposing players may drown in them before the game is done.

Prediction: UNC 832 Iowa State 31

Round 3: UNC vs. Connecticut

The Match-up: With  propensity for unfair and seditious tactics, UConn may provide a tighter contest than other foes. Even so, Dear Leader Williams, who is a perfect incarnation of the appearance that a leader should have, is not phased by the opposition of UConn coach Kevin Ollie, a neophytic oaf suspected of sex crimes. The Huskies weakness of rebounding will appear as especially feeble against UNC’s front court, who, with incomprehensible heft and hands softer than those of maidens, will carry the team to victory.

Prediction: UNC 217 Connecticut 11

MYRTLE BEACH, SC–This spring break, a record number of Fayetteville residents flocked to Myrtle Beach to commence their spring mating ritual.

“They’re a proud, fertile people,” said Dr. Garrett Walling, biologist and professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has dedicated his career to studying the mating habits of Fayetteville residents. “They are blissfully unaware of how essential their mating is to the proliferation of their species. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Walling and his team have studied the Fayetteville residents for years, documenting their reproductive habits and daily rituals. Dr. Jeremy Steinberg, a field biologist and ethnographer for the team, said the seasonal migratory mating remains a “bizarre phenomenon.”

“Primarily, we’ve seen courtship occur on the beach itself,” said Steinberg. “The males will burrow in the sand and construct massive sand-penises to attract the attention of potential mates. Females will abandon their neon or fishnet tank-tops, revealing their spongy underbellies to signify their fertility.”

“But this year there wast n’t enough space on the beach to sustain the usual courtship patterns,” he noted. “Some males converted to other methods, which we refer to as ‘off-beach activities’ or OBAs. This season, we’ve seen multiple males ask for mates ‘to come chill and pong back at the condo,’ a method usually reserved for much colder winter months.”

Walling’s team filmed hours of footage during their field expedition this spring break, adding to the already vast archive of Myrtle Beach spring break courtship video found on social media and old “Girls Gone Wild” VCR tapes.

“Unlike most organisms, Fayetteville residents engage in even more aggressive mating behavior when being filmed by researchers,” he said. “Strangely, the camera makes them more eager to expose reproductive organs and loudly give their mating calls, such as ‘WOOOO’ and ‘spring break 2014 bitches!'”

Steinberg went further in describing one of these filmed encounters.

“The male and female began mating at 4:30 p.m., ignoring a nearby group of other Fayetteville residents who were watching a UNC-Wilmington lacrosse game on television,” he said. “The sounds of the pair’s doughy, sunburnt bodies slapping against each other were as expected, but interestingly we saw that the male was still wearing his flat-brimmed hat, perhaps to further assert dominance in a season in which intrasex competition is so intense. Simply fascinating.”

Walling noted that the migratory nature of Fayetteville residents’ reproduction has created interesting adaptions in the past.

“We’ve long known that the male Fayetteville resident must avoid intimacy with potential mates. To achieve an erection, the male must know as little as possible about his partner and, ideally, neither party should know whether penetration has occurred,” he said. “We are still searching for an answer to why this must occur.”

Tagging individual residents by giving out free henna tattoos on the boardwalk, the team has found that similar adaptive behaviors may be occurring in Myrtle Beach nightclubs.

“We have seen many male Fayetteville residents don dark sunglasses to obscure physical flaws of potential partners, forcing them to rely on touch and smell alone. These males grope their way towards the most pungent combinations of tanning oil and Britney Spears perfume, key pheromones emitted by their potential female mates,” said undergraduate research assistant Keith Apperling. “These residents would do anything to avoid knowing they had sex with someone they will certainly see at the grocery store back in Fayetteville.”

In the unlikely event that the mating ritual fails, researchers said male Fayetteville residents have been known to stray from their migratory clusters and display aggressive behaviors.

“We have seen males do donuts in Piggly Wiggly parking lots, throw cinder blocks through windows, and, in their own terminology, ‘get in the face of some fucking dude and just punch him, fuck that kid, big douchebag fuck,'” Walling said.

The last time Myrtle Beach saw this large a number of mating Fayetteville residents was in 1994, when many of this season’s migrants were conceived.

CHAPEL HILL, NC–Saying that he “only wanted something quick” and that he “wishes they had just left [him] alone,” Scott Sherman, junior mathematics major, was deterred from revisiting Franklin Street restaurant Top This! after receiving attentive customer service at the eatery on Wednesday evening.

The cordial, off-putting encounter began the moment when Sherman walked alone into Top This, whereupon the owner of the establishment cheerfully welcomed the backpack-wearing diner from behind the counter.

As Sherman reluctantly approached the register after muttering a response, the affable restauranteur asked him “if he had any big tests this week,” and “what he was having today,” questions that made Sherman wish he had ordered take-out to his apartment instead.

After Sherman placed his order, he was twice asked if it was correct, which he both times affirmed, “just so they wouldn’t make it a big deal,” even though he had not, in fact, asked for onions on his sandwich.

After the owner came to Sherman’s table right after his food came to apologize for his five-minute wait, took his drink to the soda fountain to refill it for him, and asked him three bites into his meal how he was enjoying it, Sherman began eating as quickly as possible and avoiding all eye contact with the restaurant staff.

Leaving half of his french fries on his plate, Sherman fled the restaurant as he was being offered a ’10th meal free’ card with the first hole already punched out.

“I’m just going to go to Chipotle from now on,” Sherman said. “They don’t care about anyone.”

Spring Break was last week. What’s your take?

“It was great. I really needed a week away from everything I say I can’t live without.”

Suzanne Most, Political Science, ’14

“I went on a cruise to Cancun. I feel like I don’t need to party for the rest of the semester.”

Butch Licklighter, Chemistry, ’16

“I went on an alternative spring break service trip in Nicaragua. I feel like I don’t need to do good deeds for the rest of the semester.”

Donny von Braun, Naval Science, ’15

Interviews for first-year students to become Robertson Scholars are being conducted this week. If you have an interview, here are the 10 questions we KNOW you will get.

1. Would you like a glass of water?

2. Oh, you are too good for water? So, you don’t want my water. What about this mustard I spilled on my tie? Are you gonna eat that? Would you eat that for the Robertson?

3. What about these Swedish Fish that were laying on your roommate’s pillow? Are those good enough, would you eat those? Huh!?

4. What about this gummy worm that dropped on the ground? You gonna eat that for the scholarship? You better eat that if you want it..so, you gonna eat it?

5. You gonna shove these old  hushpuppies from Cookout we found in the sink down your stupid gullet?

6. We’re looking for bold leaders. The kind that would eat this pre-sucked caramel candy off the the floor. How bold are you?

7. Okay, the caramel’s too much…then just this old pastry we found in our fridge? Will you put that in your insignificant piehole?

8. Oh, you prepared more for a case interview? How about these jellybeans laying on the book Case In Point?

9. Well then just eat them out of my belly button? The other candidates did…life begins at the end of your comfort zone…

10. Too much. No, I get it. Then just this egg salad sandwich we found on a storm drain, that works for your right?

11. Or that same egg sandwich relocated to a golf cart?

12. Last question. What, would you say, are your strengths and weaknesses?