It's that time of year again. The snow is melting, spring break is right around the corner, and the most exciting three weeks in all of sports is about to descend upon us. I'm talking about the playoff-push in the XFL, of course!

Well, since we all seem to think that we'll win our respective NCAA pools (beware Crimson colleagues), I'll spare you the misery and just tell you that it's going to be Duke, Michigan State, Stanford, and Illinois that go to Minneapolis for the final act in the Big Dance. The Blue Devils will beat the Spartans 75-70 on April 2nd to win their third championship in 11 years.

See, I have a funny way of filling out my bracket. With the exception of a few first round upsets, I almost always take the higher seed to advance, as evidenced by my Final Four projections including all the No. 1 regional seeds.

Almost certainly, all four of these teams will probably not make it this far. There will surely be countless upsets and unpredictable finishes along the way. That's the sheer madness of college basketball in March, but I learned a long time ago that trying to predict upsets is a riskier proposition than going with the conventional wisdom.

One thing I'm sure of, though, is that Duke, which ended the regular season as the top ranked team in the nation, will be the most formidable force in the tournament since its 1999 squad.

We all remember the 1999 Duke team, right? It was hailed as the "Team of the Century" and a validation of the Blue Devils as the collegiate athletic program of the decade. With Elton Brand, Trajan Langdon a.k.a. the Alaskan Assassin, Chris Carrawell, Shane Battier, and Corey Maggette, Duke steamrolled to a 16-0 ACC regular season record and a 37-1 mark entering the championship game.

Duke's matchup with UConn in the NCAA final was supposed to be little more than icing on the cake for a team whose average margin of victory during March Madness was 25 points per game.

Despite these accolades and having four players who would be drafted in the top 15 of that year's NBA draft, the Blue Devils were shocked by the Huskies, who were led by none other than portly 5'9 Khalid El-Amin, now a "star" point guard for Chicago Bulls.