March is a special time in my family. Spring is in bloom (sort of ). An Easter get-together is on the horizon. MJ's birthday approaches.

But nothing brings us all together like the one thing that tears us apart: NCAA bracket time.

This will be our 4th Annual Family Bracket Pool. The games may be full of suspense, but the brackets won't be. My mom and I will pick North Carolina to win it all. My dad and sister will, regretfully, choose Dook. Randy will look for the Leafs on his bracket, and, not finding them, will pick his teams in a random zig-zag pattern that has more to do with geometry than college basketball.

He will handily win the first and second round competition using this method, brag about the use of engineering principles to predict NCAA contests, trash talk all the Americans who trash-talked the Canadian ... and then proceed to crash and burn in the Sweet Sixteen. He will spend the rest of the tournament rooting for the underdog, even if the underdog is playing UNC, which will not endear him to his wife.

And my mom, employing a combination of guesswork and pleading with the television to let the right teams win, will indeed come away with the $5 jackpot -- which no one will "remember" to make good on, even if she does remind them every so often using time-honored motherly tools of passive persuasion. ("Well, I guess no one is going to pay me, after all.") Let the games begin.