The curious mix of basketball and bombs.

Because it's March Madness, because it's a national office pool obsession, because it's spectacle that dances with joy and because it's happening even as bombs fall on Baghdad, I mentioned the NCAA basketball tournament to a dear friend. She said, "What's a basketball?"

She's paying no attention to basketball because her heart and mind have important business. Her oldest son is at war. Where, she doesn't know. Maybe moving in Afghanistan's mountains or arriving in Kuwait or crossing the Iraqi desert toward Baghdad. Wherever he is, whatever he's doing, he's in harm's way--and she's his mother, waiting.

Basketball?

What's a basketball?

Yet we come to the dance and we see the gloriously, doofus duck mascot from Oregon lift an orange webbed foot to show the message, "Support Our Troops." Better, we see Matt Crenshaw standing at attention for the national anthem. Six years in U.S. Navy whites, now he's in a basketball uniform. We see him rub his chest, there above the heart. At song's end, he snaps off a military salute. He's thinking of an old buddy, a Marine, another young man at peril.

"We'd work out together," says Crenshaw, a 6-4 junior guard at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. "We'd play ball together."

How tall is he?