In life, we are our own worst enemy. Our minds are the culprit. Our grey matter gives us an opportunity to think freely and deeply about any subject, and that freedom many times serves to confuse us. The more we think, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish important nuance from white noise. Bias from significance. Yesterday from tomorrow. It’s a sort of internal schizophrenia–as we weigh those things deemed important to us, we are bound to find conflict in every judgment, in every fact. This includes those things we believe to be important.

We will think in abundance for the next seven days, the future, because they are the last seven days before the season tips off.

Think about the number of times you’ve thought about the future. Think about what it meant and how different it was every time you considered it—how it was a moving target based on the influences of today. Your mind can game theory any facet of your life so that you can come to any reasonable decision for any situation. First place or fifth; NCAA or NIT; season tickets or not.

This causes struggle and strife, and is the driving force behind entire industries (such as self help books). But what is happening today is its greatest influence.

The number of times you thought you knew it all numbers in the millions, and dates to fifth grade. The plain fact is that you know very little about the world outside that of which is particularly important to you and you know even less about tomorrow. The paradox of the web world is that we have more information and perspective at our fingertips, and that has mostly allowed us to discover how much we don’t know.

It’s why blissful ignorance is both blissful, and ignorant. It’s why you are better sorting out other people’s lives than your own. It’s also why preseason college basketball polls are very popular and very useless.

And that’s where we sit in this, the longest week. Expectations based on opinions that are no more grounded in reality than reality teevee. Everyone has chimed in with their opinion, and people who care about your spare time because it’s what they enjoy in their spare time have tried to make it easier for you.

Therein resides the paradox of the longest week—the preseason prognostications are exactly right, but only because we have nothing else to measure. Everyone has hope, and for one week not even the players and coaches can do anything about it.

The hopeful belief is what coaches call taking it one game at a time. For us, it’s staying in the moment. There’s nothing we can do to change yesterday, and really, nothing we can do to alter what will happen tomorrow.

Oh, we can influence tomorrow, but we cannot control it. Matt Janning could shoot 500 free throws every day, dog tired, but nobody–not Janning nor Bill Coen–can prematurely control a Janning make or miss on the front end of a one-and-one with two minutes to play in a tight game.

College basketball is our passion because it is one unchoreographed moment after another. That’s also why this is the longest week–we know those moments are near. And I’m not talking just about the games. It’s every part of it. We’ve long said the best hour is the 60 minutes leading up to tipoff. That’s why sitting and watching a game on teevee or on your computer doesn’t compare to getting out to games and soaking in the feeling of the moment.

The cognitive ability to stay in the moment is certainly a toughie—anything worth a pootie is tough. This week, perhaps, is the most difficult. The season looms so close you are making plans, but not yet there. No distraction of tonight’s game exists. Your mind—that trickster that allows you to do this endlessly—has you pondering the first game, the next game, and the season. It has you determining impacts of the first game on everything else, including your general state of happiness, because you have an attachment to college basketball.

And even though everything changes, every year, you come back because of that attachment. Kyle Whelliston wrote a wonderful essay about this, but there is one fundamental idea where I believe he is wrong. The attachment to how we spend our time isn’t only understood by college students. We all understand it, just in our own way and how our life has changed. We are forced, because we are older and have responsibilities, to compartmentalize. Instead of painting our face, we paint the face of our children. We don’t eat the Dip ‘N Dots—they do. The wig is not a funky, spiky fakeroo with our school colors. Now, it’s a toupee with our natural hair color. Tailgating becomes parking “head out,” so you can make a quick escape.

There is nothing wrong with change. In fact, a very wise person recently told me that a change in your patterns likely means something better is in the offing, and you simply need to make room for it. Just ask the folks in Norfolk about some unknown yokel from Montana about change. (You know how we feel about karma in these parts.)

We all change in some way, but the aspect that hasn’t is our attachment is to the game of college basketball. There is something there that holds us, some purity, some mathematical equation that somehow makes sense at the very bottom right of the blackboard. Just go with it, and enjoy it, and stay in the moment. I realize that’s darn near impossible this week, the longest week, but try your best.

“I can’t wait for it to start” will be replaced by “I can’t believe it’s over” before you know it. And if you worry about anything other than what’s in front of you, a college basketball game that you love, you will cheat yourself. That would be a shame.