Well, we've (mostly) reached the end of the regular season and it's been a good one. Before we talk about the format for the playoffs, I have to mention an amazing thing that happened last Sunday. On Court 1 (Rob's Court), we had 12 games and all 12 ended with single-digit margins! That's incredible. I'm pretty sure that that has never happened before in the 38-year history of the Tucson Basketball League. We started off with Tio Drews squeaking pass the Paper Route Hoopers, 39-35, and Mambas beating Regulators, 47-45. Then came scores of 51-43, 56-51, 80-73, and 64-55. What followed was even wilder. Skoden broke the century mark against the Saints. Hundred-point games are quite rare in the TBL and when they do happen, they're usually blowouts. This was 104-95 and pretty much went down to the wire. Then, it got weird. We had back-to-back overtime games and two consecutive games that ended with identical scores of 54-50. With Phantomz edging Swoosh and Storm staying unbeaten with a 71-62 win over The Avengers, we ended the day with a dozen straight close games. Whoever scheduled those games is an absolute genius!
After that, three of the six games on Court 2 ended with two-point margins. On Court 5, the day ended with Splash Pad beating Cool Arrows, 73-72. Like Ice Cube said, it was a good day.
Now come the playoffs. We actually have fewer teams than last season, but not by a significant amount. I told a few teams that they couldn't come back, a couple others were hit by injuries, and there is always the matter of economics. However, we still have so many teams that it takes two weeks to complete the first round of the playoffs. This season, those two weeks will be this Sunday (March 22nd) and then March 29th. The following Sunday, April 5th, is Easter and the venue will be closed on that day. We'll then have the semifinals on April 12th and the championship games on April 19th.
The Summer 2026 season will begin on April 26th. The way things are going, it will probably be 115 degrees by then. If any of you still believe that climate change is not real, you should go out and buy some cryptocurrency from one of Donald Trump's sons.
Easter Sunday lands at an okay time this year, but it doesn't always. As mentioned here before, in the Middle Ages, the date for Easter kept getting later and later, so Pope Gregory XIII got some mathematicians and scientists together and they came up with the Gregorian Calendar (which we use today). They decided that Easter would be the first Sunday after the first full moon of Spring (which officially starts on March 21st). This year, the first full moon of Spring will be Friday, April 3rd, so Easter will be on the 5th. Next year, Easter will be in March.
A couple oddities: In the year 1818, the full moon landed on Saturday, March 21st, so the next day was Easter. That's the earliest ever and it won't happen again until the year 2285. However, there was an Easter on March 23rd as recently as 2008. The latest ever Easter was April 25, 1943. The full moon came on March 20th, one day before Spring. The next one was April 18th, but that was a Sunday, so they had to wait for the next Sunday to be Easter. That's actually going to happen again in 2038, only 12 years from now. We also had one on April 24th in 2011.
Catholic schools generally have their Spring Break coincide with Holy Week, leading up to Easter. So, in 2011, they had Spring Break, came back after Easter, had a couple weeks of school, and then Graduation.
This week, we will have some regular-season makeup games and a limited number of playoff games. The makeups are for a few teams that, for whatever reason, requested multiple extra byes during the regular season and for teams who had opponents forfeit their games. The remainder of the first-round games will be played on March 29th. Good luck to everyone.
