If it wouldn’t have been snowy and icy and all around awful this morning, I would have gotten a picture.

But I found the Minnesota sports fan that I feel the absolute worst for on my commute this morning.

As I pulled up to the stoplight at Winnetka Ave. and Highway 55, there was a Chevy Malibu in one car ahead of me in the other lane. It had a vanity license plate which read simply:

“TWOLVES”

No, I’m not making this up. I couldn’t make that up if I tried. Now I like the NBA. I am one of a cast of many that split a pair of Timberwolves season tickets. I find some of their young players interesting. I think they should have been better this season, but I do think there are some good parts there.

But I can’t, for even a split-second, imagine a world in which I would consider a license plate with a Wolves reference on it.

Can you imagine the kind of lines that guy gets when he pulls into a crowded parking lot? Even mild-mannered me might say something to him. After all, the Wolves have the worst record in the Western Conference and the second-worst in all of the NBA.

But I guess I have to give him credit for being loyal. After all, the Wolves are about to complete their sixth consecutive losing season. In that stretch (since the beginning of the 2005-06 season), they are a combined 143-338

And he supports that team every time he gets in his car. Wow.

Lego versions of key NCAA tournament moments.

In a word: Awesome.

Watch it here

For you non-Minnesotans, the high school hockey tournament here is kind of a big deal. The big class pretty much sells out the arena where the Minnesota Wild play, games are on TV and get pretty decent ratings.

And while the whole idea of hockey hair seems like it might be a cliche, here is some pretty good video proof that big and long hair is still alive and well.

This is worth a watch and should generate at least a chuckle.

It was the end of February 2006 when I received the email. I was still covering college basketball and knew way too much about way too many teams.

The email came from my friend Dave Curtis, then of the Orlando Sentinel. And it was about one of the craziest/greatest pools I’ve ever been a part of. In a newsroom, there are always pools going on. When I was an intern at The Phoenix Gazette in the summer of 1994 when O.J. Simpson began the white Bronco chase, there was a pool. You put in a buck and had to guess time of capture and dead or alive.

Since then, I’ve been in pools about college hockey, NASCAR, junior college basketball and the NIT.

But The Jerome is the greatest thing ever. What is it? Named after backboard-shatterer Jerome Lane, you basically you have to pick the winner of every men’s basketball conference tournament.

In 2007, my friend Dan Wetzel wrote a column about the awesomeness of The Jerome. He summed it up like this:

“The Jerome is a tournament pool for the truly deranged NCAA follower – mostly, in this case, sportswriters armed with too much useless information and too little of a real life. It requires picking the winners of all 30 conference tournaments and, through various bonus points, churns out a champion who truly should be ashamed of his knowledge of the sport.

It’s basically your NCAA office pool on steroids.”

I can honestly tell you that aside from the “the golf course is opening for season,” the arrival of The Jerome email is one of my favorite days of the year.

This week is filled with championship games in a bevy of generally obscure leagues. Monday night we’ve got championship games in the Colonial Athletic Association and the MAAC. On Tuesday we get the Horizon League title game and a bunch of early games in other leagues.

Maybe it sounds crazy, but it is fun to get excited by the fact that Wofford reached the SoCon title game. Or that you get screwed over by Coastal Carolina losing in the Big South semis (I learned the hard way that you just can’t trust those Chanticleers.).

Anyway, the event has grown from small to now more than 180 people. There is no money exchanged. It’s all about pride and talking trash. The group is interesting. I don’t know nearly as much about hoops as many of these folks — there’s even a former coach turned TV guy in the field who coached in the NCAA tournament. It is very fun.

Picks are made in two waves. One for the tournaments that started this past week and another for ones that start this week.

Here are my early picks. I appear to be very much in the middle of the pack so far.

Now excuse me, I need to break down the rest of the conferences. I don’t want to finish last.