With Selection Sunday quickly approaching, it's hard to find a sports story not involving the NCAA basketball tournament.
I can't even go on Facebook without seeing that 100 of my friends, who know nothing about basketball, have joined one (or 20) of the thousands of pools created on the site.
All the talk this week leading up to Selection Sunday will be about the conference tournaments, which "bubble" teams are in and which ones are out, which teams deserve No. 1 seeds and which teams have the potential to become this year's George Mason.
However, unless some type of miracle happens in Los Angeles this weekend, one team that no one will be talking about is the ASU Sun Devils.
But it won't be that way for long.
I've been following ASU my entire life, but I can honestly say I've never experienced any sort of basketball tradition here.
That, my friends, is about to change.
I can see it in our current players. I haven't seen an ASU basketball team compete this hard and never give up under any circumstances the way the team did this year.
Does ASU have the talent of UCLA, Washington State, Oregon or UA? No.
But the Sun Devils took all those teams down to the wire this year, and if the ball would have bounced their way one or two more times, then students would have stormed the court more than once this season.
Losing Kevin Kruger and Bryson Kruger was probably a blessing in disguise this year because it allowed some freshmen to get valuable game experience in crunch time and in hostile environments.
That will pay dividends in the coming years.
I can see it in ASU's coaching staff.
Herb Sendek arrived in the desert less than 12 months ago and basically brought a McDonald's All-American with him in Eric Boateng.
Combine that with a stellar first recruiting class, highlighted by another McDonald's All-American in James Harden, and it can be argued that Sendek has brought more elite talent to Tempe in one year than Rob Evans did in his entire ASU career.
Let's rewind. The Sun Devils will have two McDonald's All-Americans on their team next year.
Now there's something I've never seen at ASU in my lifetime, and it will be a blast to watch those two players in maroon and gold next year.
I can see it in our students and fans. While the Sun Devil faithful were pretty apathetic at the beginning of the season, the support shown during the last few home games was pretty awesome for a last-place team.
Between Sendek hyping up the fans after getting ejected during the Washington game, to the team nearly upsetting WSU and UCLA, to the students storming the court against USC, to gold clearly outnumbering red for the first time in a long time against UA, Wells Fargo Arena was rocking during the Sun Devils' final home games and is on the verge of becoming a place that no team wants to play.
The final step should be this - move the students to mid-court once they show consistent support.
Most of the major college basketball programs do this and it will really create a home court advantage.
The culture of ASU basketball is changing.
It's time to jump on the bandwagon, join the Herbivores and get excited about the future of this program.
March Madness is already one of the greatest times of the year in sports.
Imagine how great it's going to be when we're all filling out our brackets and the Sun Devils are part of that madness.
Reach the reporter at ginz.mizell@asu.edu.
