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When the week began, it seemed everyone in New York wore green and talked about St. Patrick’s Day; as the week winds down, that trend has been shoved aside for red and St. John’s. That can only mean one thing- March Madness has arrived! The NCAA Tournament will feature 48 college basketball games between now and Sunday, and as the only New York area school in the Big Dance, the St. John’s Red Storm will be the talk of the town; with two wins this weekend and two more wins next weekend, St. John’s would be in the Final Four for the first time since the storied days of 1985. Under second-year coach Rick Pitino’s guiding hand, bringing the title to Utopia Parkway seems like a reasonable accomplishment. WOR’s Beat on the Street reporter Natalie Migliore hit the streets around Rockefeller Center for 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to see if the Johnnies have captured everyone’s attention.
Migliore found Jeff, who wistfully remembered filling out his bracket in the days before the internet: “People don’t have the same enthusiasm, how March Madness used to run in the days, per se, when I used to remember it, when newspapers used to come out and they- you have the March Madness in the papers and you put your colleges, list of teams, and things like that- with a pen! You got to do it with a pen, not a pencil! You got to do it with a pen; I don’t see nobody do that no more.”
Another fan, however, just rolled with the changes in technology; it’s the off-the-court changes with players getting royalties and leaving school after one year that have him pining for the old days: “Just do it online; it’s the same thing. The one thing that’s kind of dissipating is the Cinderella stories, because of the NIL (name, image, likeness) and the [transfer] portals. That might be a little difficult for the Cinderella teams to finesse, but I don’t know.”
Yet, Migliore somehow found a handful of pedestrians who had no idea what was going on. One man just said, “I’m a hockey guy” as he walked on, while another simply stated, “I don’t watch sports. I have no idea what you’re talking about, sorry.”
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