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Chant along with me:
4 more years

MOST people look back at the year's sports highlights in December. I've got March.

What I'm talking about now is March madness in truly its maddest form.

Yes, it was four years and several days ago, probably through clerical error, that I started this job. Four years. I'm like the president. I'm in my second term.

Also like the president, there are people out there calling for a recount.

(Yes, I'm often wrong. But I'm resolute about it. Polls have shown that the American people see it as an indication of my character and strong values.)

Another year, another great ride.

I boldly picked the 'Bows -- "a lock," I said -- to win their NIT opener at Utah State. They made sure to put "idiot" in the headline. It was great.

I was fired up by madman/poet Frank Gansz, who gave me a go-get-'um inspirational football pep talk about ... French Impressionist painters.

A former sub from Chaminade gave me step-by-step instructions on how I, too, could declare for the NBA Draft.

I stood in the midst of a rocking, stomping, chanting mob of Iowa fans foaming at the mouth at the Maui Classic. It was like a mosh pit -- if the moshers were all 52 and from Keokuk.

I was there when Tim Chang gave that football to his father and Ryan Moats ran for 200 yards with only one leg.

I saw Chad Owens have the kind of season Grantland Rice would have written poems about. And Michigan State lose a football game on the kind of mugging of a visitor that usually makes the Hawaii Tourism Authority step in with an "aloha bag" and pleas to the public that this kind of thing doesn't make us look too good.

There was a skater. An umpire. Surfers smiling with autistic kids. The Wahine going 30-0.

Riding cramped and freezing in the dark in the back of a pickup truck, watching a marathon champ make his move when the sun did. Like a punt returner breaking into the open field.

I was there when Arnold Palmer made one last great shot, and walked with his bride, arm in arm.

It was a good year. Let's do it again.