If you’re like me, you love the month of March. It signals that the year is already a quarter of the way done, it is the month of my birthday, and it hosts one of the greatest month-long events in the history of sports, the NCAA Tournament.

This event goes by many names, “The Big Dance” and “March Madness” to name a few, but the one thing that remains the same about this tournament is that everyone will hear about it and they cannot escape it.

From the second the brackets were finalized and announced, millions across the country began to fill out their own online brackets and some even revived the dead art of filling out a bracket on paper.

Even us at The Skyline View have succumbed to this craze. The Monday after the brackets were printed, a few of us on newspaper staff took some time out to fill out our brackets accordingly.

At one point, our student advisor came out of her office and saw us writing intently and assumed we were working hard on journalistic endeavors. It took her about 15 minutes to realize that we were filling out brackets. It’s safe to say she wasn’t so ecstatic about our lack out journalistic focus. She even went so far as to tweet about us, which made the situation even more hilarious.

This process has become so big that Yahoo held a contest that gave one winner $1 billion dollars if they had a perfect bracket at the end of the tournament. According to CNN, the odds of this happening were 9.2 quintillion to one. So it was safe to assume that the contest was doomed from the beginning.

But now that the quest for the quickest $1 billion dollar win in history is over, sports fans are left with 16 remaining teams battling to one championship. But how does this tournament affect the common student?

Well, considering I can only speak for myself, I try my hardest to separate school and March Madness entirely.

Since the beginning of the tournament, pictures of students finding creative ways to watch these games on their computers, phones and tablets have been as hilarious as you can imagine. I found myself itching to check the scores of certain games during one of my classes, a practice that I regret completely due to the fact that it took away from a project I should have been paying attention to.

So how should students handle such a distracting event and focus on what’s important. In today’s age of endless apps and continuing sports coverage, it’s easier than ever to keep track of the games AFTER they have happened.

Trust me, it was hard for me to take this task into consideration, but it has to be done. Luckily, the amount of games has decreased so focusing on school has become easier. So enjoy these last 16 games, but keep your scholastic endeavors in mind.