One of the many joys of the NCAA tournament is that it can be savored as two distinct events. There is of course the desire to see the strongest teams with the best records settle this question head-to-head. This dynamic emerges over the second weekend and can on occasion shine forth to brilliant effect at the Final Four.

The first weekend’s radically different. The last five brackets in particular have shown how fully the round of 64 embraces the term March Madness.

Over that time we’ve seen two No. 1 seeds fall in the round of 64. We’re on a three-year streak of a No. 2 seed losing to a No. 15 each March. These are upheavals that “should” occur just one and seven percent of the time, respectively. We’ve been awash in rarity since 2018.

The round of 64 holds two qualities that are scarce if not wholly absent anywhere else in team sports as media properties. First there’s the sheer volume of the knockout round: 32 games in 36 hours, give or take. Often there are four games happening at once and every one constitutes the most important 40 minutes of the season to the teams and their entire fan bases.

Those of us who aren’t fans of either team in a given game watch the round of 64 hoping to glimpse something that happens just seven or even only one percent of the time. This second quality is what the NCAA itself brings as the secret sauce to its cash cow event.

The NCAA tournament is a single-elimination bracket where teams from all 32 Division I conferences play for what’s recognized as the sole national championship. The first half of this mission statement is a choice. The second half’s an achievement, one that right up to the 1960s the NCAA had to hustle and compete to attain.

Bringing “include teams from all 32 conferences” together with “award the sole and unquestioned championship” is an example of the familiar standing out as extraordinary. We don’t often see this in other mass-audience sports. In effect the NCAA tournament is an “open” championship that 360-odd teams can qualify to enter.

It is the all-inclusive quality spanning 32 conferences that needs to be defended to the hilt. It is this inclusive quality that should have a moat dug around it and guarded like the crown jewels. And it is precisely this quality that will be lost if history ever repeats itself and a complacent or recalcitrant NCAA allows a true D-I men’s basketball championship to slip through its fingers the way top-flight football was wrested from its hands 40 years ago.

By some stroke of luck this hasn’t happened yet. Rather incredibly, the major conferences have not walked away and formed their own gated-community version of the Champions League where the conferences themselves pocket all the revenue directly.

The bidding for such an event’s media rights would be robust. I would watch such an event eagerly. It would after all capture and potentially even amplify one of the two distinct qualities of the current NCAA tournament.

Such an event could do some amazing and very un-NCAA things. But what such an event would not be is the first weekend we have now. What it would not be is March Madness.

Imagine the pitch we who love the tournament would have to try to make to major-conference commissioners if we woke up today and found that, like the main character in “Yesterday” with the Beatles, we’re the only people in the world who remember March Madness. These zero-memory commissioners might not immediately rise as one to say, why, yes, absolutely we’ll be delighted to bracket our No. 1 seeds with Fairleigh Dickinson or UMBC in the opening round. Who doesn’t love exposure to a one percent chance of catastrophe? Say, while we’re at it let’s make sure we share revenue with the NEC, Big Sky, Southland, Patriot, everyone. Spreading that wealth? Nothing would please us more.

This week we learned that commissioners from the major conferences met with NCAA President Charlie Baker in Washington D.C. last month to discuss, among other topics, expanding the NCAA tournament field. The news brought forth an online response from the college basketball press and from fans that felt no less intense for being so familiar.

An overwhelming majority of people who voice an opinion loathe the idea of expanding the NCAA tournament. This has been crystal clear ever since the NCAA itself floated an ill-conceived proposal at the 2010 Final Four to expand to 96 teams. Back then the NCAA was shouted down for being greedy and, somewhat quaintly in retrospect, for overlooking the amount of time that additional games would take away from the classroom. No one talks about that second bit anymore with respect to revenue sports, but the charge of greed is evergreen and is now directed at the major conferences.

The commissioners want a larger bracket for selfish reasons. They believe that if the field expands then more of their teams will receive bids. In all probability they will be disappointed in this belief (going back more than a decade mid-majors are twice as populous between Nos. 30 and 60 at KenPom as they are between 1 and 30), but that’s neither here nor there. It is tradition that the commissioners push for a larger field and are then roundly criticized for a greedy disregard of the treasure that is March Madness.

Possibly the commissioners hold no monopoly on selfish motivations. I for one selfishly want the major conferences to continue to behave as though an event that includes members from every conference is the real national championship. There is of course nothing selfless or noble in my preference, one that requires zero sacrifice on my part. I just love the first weekend.

For the past few years and to an almost cartoonish extent last spring, the NCAA has made plain that it selfishly prefers to just not be bothered with the idea of expansion. They recite the right phrases about this stance being for the good of the game. If the NCAA really believed this they would wrestle inertia to the ground this once and do the actual work to model a proposal floated by stakeholders who can at one stroke burn this event to the ground. Instead, at least last year, the NCAA let it be known with rather disarming candor that a larger bracket would be more difficult to fit on one page and anyway expansion would require a good deal of planning and thousands of hours of coordination.

Say for the sake of discussion the commissioners get what they want from the NCAA. Waving a magic wand and creating an 80-team field in 2024 would put 22 percent of D-I in an event where representation has stayed between 19 and 23 percent for four decades. Over that time the shot clock and the three-point line were introduced, the RPI died, the NCAA’s power shriveled, the hegemony of the elite conferences metastasized, coaching staffs ballooned, athletic facilities came to resemble the Palace of Versailles, programs started recruiting internationally, transfers became paradoxically abundant yet valuable, and the players at long last began to be paid.

All the while representation in the bracket as a share of D-I has effectively stayed the same. It will continue to do so if the field expands by 12 bids. Yet we’re told this will surely mean the end of the tournament or the regular season or both.

Maybe the NCAA can just say no to expansion and get away with it. The major conferences could keep playing along instead of striking out on their own after seeing another KenPom No. 30-something member bumped while a No. 170-something automatic qualifier advances. On the other hand it’s conceivable that at some point the big conferences will say enough already. To quote my favorite president, have we no tendency to the latter condition?

Telling the major conferences no and then closing our eyes, hoping for the best, and living with the tail risk of March Madness disappearing entirely is one potential course of action. Another would be coming up with a postseason modus vivendi where everyone gets something and no one gets everything.

The major conferences would get their larger bracket. The field would expand to 80 teams. All automatic qualifiers along with the top 16 at-larges will proceed to the round of 64. These 48 entrants will be joined by 16 survivors from an all-at-large 32-team qualifying round played on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Aficionados of the first weekend would continue seeing top seeds bracketed in single-elimination basketball against Fairleigh Dickinson and UMBC.

Mid-majors would get a portion of what they’ve been clamoring for since the 2010 discussion. It has long rankled the majority of D-I that even their outright regular-season champions face an all-or-nothing proposition in the conference tournament in order to earn a bid. Per my friend Ken’s good idea, conferences that win a game in the round of 64 will have a bid reserved the following March for their outright regular-season champion. (True ticket-punched court storms in the regular season would be shared instantly and everywhere.) Those champions can then improve their bracket position further by winning the conference tournament and earning a bye to the round of 64.

Fans properly suspicious of major-conference poobahs swaying an expanded field in the direction of dreaded “mediocre teams from big conferences” will get a March selection that’s committee-free. For the last decade the 1960s-vintage committee has staggered forward not as an instrumental necessity but as a professional plum for its members.

Committee members understandably love doing something that to a rare extent is both prestigious and fun. We all would. But once the NCAA is seen as acquiescing to all-powerful big conferences on expansion, the long outdated jury-and-verdict model of selection will additionally be questioned on grounds of legitimacy. Instead of meeting in March, the committee will convene in May or June, update and publish the Google-engineered win proxy that will select at-larges the following season and then let the chips fall where they may.

Finally, the NCAA will get to continue drawing its revenue from a championship event recognized as awarding the sole national championship.

A smaller portion of D-I plays in the NCAA tournament today than at any time since 1984. Who knows, people who loathe the idea of expansion may come to kind of like a Tuesday and Wednesday that are no longer sleepy and half-full of No. 16 vs. 16 games. Volume doesn’t have to be just a Thursday-to-Sunday thing. Broadcast partners could be open to tweaking a contract extending to the 2030s even if it means forgoing reruns of “The Carbonaro Effect” on two March weeknights.

Those who worry about watering down the field by adding teams that currently miss the cut may find those teams are in fact uncannily and perennially similar to the last at-larges that do get bids. Two years ago the potential “expansion” cohort was stronger than a like number of the last real-life at-larges.

Committee members may find the real-time actual brackets they made possible have been promoting this event and these teams from the first day of the season in November. The committee may enjoy springtime outside the conference room and instead preside at a raucous NBA-style bracket draft at Hinkle Fieldhouse.

Should Kentucky stay closer to home and possibly face Houston in Dallas or should the Wildcats go to LA for a potential final against Arizona? Why on earth is the NCAA deciding this? Make John Calipari decide, on the clock, live on CBS. The current selection show is in effect the reading of a list. A bracket draft will provide far more drama, draw more viewers, last longer, and sell more ads.

Nothing surfaces more naturally as our first thought than the “I like the status quo, let’s do nothing” syllogism. I adore the status quo. Preserving it may require doing something.