Monday night was host to one of sport's biggest events, and it separated the winners from the losers.
Florida was certainly the biggest winner of the night, capturing its first-ever college basketball national championship with a defeat of UCLA, 73-57.
But with the end of this year's exhilarating and often-surprising NCAA tournament, college students around the country discovered who won and who lost in the first annual college basketball tournament pool on popular college personal directory Facebook.com.
Some 582,518 brackets were entered in the competition across North America, with 711 participants from Tufts in the competition. The brackets were tabulated using an "underdog" scoring method that encouraged participants to try and pick upsets throughout the field. Under this scoring format, an entry would receive one point for a correct first round pick, two for a second round pick, four for a third-round pick, and eight for a fourth-round pick if they picked the favorite correctly.
However, if an underdog was picked and went on to win, the amount of points for the win would be multiplied by the difference between the lower seed and the higher seed it had defeated. The national semifinals were worth 15 points and the championship game was worth 25 points regardless of the seeds that won the games.
This method created a tremendous amount of variety in the brackets, and found some players picking upsets that few of even the most avid college hoops fans saw coming.
This year's perfect bracket, according to "underdog" scoring, would have yielded 383 points. The highest recorded total in the overall competition was 256 points, achieved by both sophomore Amanda LaBlanc of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and freshman Steven Kester of Southeastern Oklahoma State University.
Not surprisingly, among the school rankings, all of the Final Four teams finished in the top 20 in the school total rankings, led by Florida. Seven Floridian schools scored in the top 20 overall, while Cinderella George Mason had to settle for fourth place.
This year's Tufts winner was sophomore Maria O'Brien, whose great early-round picks allowed her to jump into the lead and hold on for the title, finishing with 137 points.
"It was my first time ever doing a bracket," O'Brien said. "I was invited into a pool by [sophomore] Meredith Pickett, and just decided to do it. I'm not really into sports, and wasn't really sure what I was doing."
Despite a professed inexperience, and perhaps aided by beginner's luck, O'Brien picked several key upsets early in the tournament, including Northwestern State over Iowa, Montana over Nevada, Bradley over Kansas and Pittsburgh, and Georgetown over Ohio State. She also was one of the few people not attending George Mason to advance the Patriots to the Elite Eight.
O'Brien cruised to victory on the points she earned from her early predictions, as none of her Final Four choices - Air Force, Xavier, Texas A&M and Georgetown - managed to make it to the national semifinal round.
"I had no idea about the 'underdog' scoring system and basically picked schools that I knew," O'Brien said. "I used to live in Fairfax, [Virginia] so I picked George Mason. I picked Xavier because the name sounded cool. I didn't watch any of the games, and didn't know I was winning until Meredith told me."
Although O'Brien fell short of the grand prize of a flat-screen television, she has gained a year's worth of bragging rights from the entire school. Will she defend her title next year?
"If somebody invites me into a pool next year, I'd do it again and use the same logic," O'Brien said. "In any sport, the results are so arbitrary. Anything can happen."
