Hello, March. It's been too long.

Please excuse the author for his excessive use of exclamation points and capital letters in this post. It is his favorite time of year.

March is finally here, and for me, that means non-stop excitement, baby! I GOT DICKIE V SYNDROME, BABY!

The Texas/Texas A&M game Wednesday night got me super jacked up for the next month of hoops. Double OT?!?! ARE YOU SERIOUS?!?! Ohhh, Kevin Durant and Acie Law were absolutely sensational! A couple of PTPers (that's primetime players for you Dickie V illiterates) going at it, baby!

How can you not be ready to dance after that one? It seems like Texas always finds a way to get itself into those adrenaline-pumping, down-to-the-wire games, and that's where Durant plays his best. He could put the Horns on his back and shuffle all the way to Atlanta in a few weeks.

Texas is one of my eight favorites to make the Final Four. The others: Kansas, UCLA, Memphis, Georgetown, Maryland, UNC and my sleeper: West Virginia. But don't listen to me. Make sure you fill out a bracket for yourself. And enter the ESPN pool online for a chance to win $10,000. It could happen ... I went to high school with the guy that won first place in 2005: Dustin Kubas.

The culmination of all the excitement will begin on March 11 -- Selection Sunday -- and end sometime in the early morning on March 16, at the end of the first day of games. Yes, it's a five-day culmination, accentuated by the fun of filling out brackets, guessing which 12 seeds will knock off 5 seeds (because it always happens) and, of course, the play-in game.

Will this be the year a No. 1 seed loses to a 16? Who will be this year's George Mason? Can Durant pull a Carmelo and lead the Horns all the way? I CAN'T WAIT, BABY!

From now until then, I hope Michigan and Michigan State can lose their bubblicious labels and put on some dancin' shoes. But if fortune only smiles on one of the two teams and the Spartans end up NITin', I won't lose any sleep over it.