When Selection Sunday was only days away last week, Joe Lunardi was operating on what he calls his "fever pitch."
Every waking moment was spent glued to the TV, with every men's college basketball game that mattered to the selection committee flickering, all so he could update his NCAA tournament projections from his laptop, late into the night.
Forget about sleep. Forget about eating or breathing — much. ESPN's "Joey Brackets" usually exhales only after the Selection Show.
That exhale should have come Sunday evening — after CBS' annual bracket reveal — but instead it came disturbingly earlier this year.
Lunardi was at a hotel Thursday in Bristol, Conn., sipping coffee and fiddling with his projections when word came that the NCAA was canceling March Madness.
"The fan part of me was sad way more than the bracket guy," Lunardi said in a phone interview. "I was just dazed because I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing. But I'm very mindful of the fact that way more people have it so much worse."
Lunardi did not spend Sunday at ESPN's campus, with sports fans hanging on his every word about the 68-team NCAA tournament bracket.
He was home in Philadelphia with his wife, Pam. They planned to discuss how their youngest daughter, Elizabeth, will try graduating from St. Joseph's University this spring while being limited to online classes.