March Madness has arrived. As an ­Indiana ­Hoosier, this is my absolute favorite sporting time of the year. I grew up in the farmlands where basketball is not only revered but also played in the weirdest way … out in the pasture on the green, silky Indiana grass courts. Remember the movie Hoosiers with all its barnyard basketball goals? It was filmed in my very region of the state.

As children, my daughters lived for the week that we traveled to Indiana each year and they got to play basketball on the grass courts. Kids were outside all summer shooting hoops so they could get a “pickup” game almost anywhere. They also listened to the same stories from their grandpa every summer — how he single-handedly scored enough points to beat the other team when he was a senior in high school in 1937. He scored 22 points and the final score of the game was 35-21.