There is nothing more thrilling, more gut-wrenching or more excruciating that tournament college basketball. Whether it’s a conference final, the play-in game for the Madness of March or the NCAA championship game itself, it’s about as exciting a sporting experience as it ever gets.

And if you’re in an office pool, it’s even more fun.

The college game is so much different that the pro game. For one thing, there is no money involved in the outcome. There is, potentially, money involved in an individual performance, but it always seems that by the time these young players reach these monster tournaments (call ‘em reality TV shows if you like), you get the sense they aren’t thinking about the money so much as they are the prestige.

And unlike the pro game, the college game has actual rules that make sense. Travelling, as a for-instance. The college game looks a lot less like some bastardized version of European team handball than the pro game does with all its carry-balls and six steps to the hoop.

And that’s why it really chafes my ass when the officiating sucks. And believe me, with all the TV technology these days, it’s apparent it sucks a lot more than it’s good. In fact, there were times this past weekend when it just sucked out loud.

As an example – and there were many – in the recent Illinois-Ohio State Big Ten Tournament semi-final game, statutory rape was committed at one end of the floor and no foul was called while at the other, a soft tap on the shoulder would draw a two-shot foul and a warning. It’s a strange game this college basketball. It is played with all the heart and emotion that one could possibly muster with no sense of consistency or even thought – unless that thought is how much money I have placed on this game in Vegas.

If the refereeing were decent, just decent, tournament college basketball would be the perfect game. As it is it’s often very difficult to watch and even more difficult to understand – at least, without screaming at the TV.

Sure, the Canadian Football League is still 2 ½ months away from the start of training camp, but do you get the sense the Winnipeg Blue Bombers are a long way from being a contender?

In fact, last year at this time, many of the local football experts were worried that the team being assembled by Mike Kelly was starting to resemble the team that was assembled in 1998 by Jeff Reinebold. Plenty of no-names and an untested quarterback caused many of our great local football minds to question the new head coach.

Wonder where they all went this year?

I mean, really, has anyone noticed that the Blue Bombers have lost both of their good young defensive halfbacks? Jonathan Hefney signed with the NFL’s Detroit Lions while Lenny Walls was released to Montreal. Granted they signed aging Lavar Glover, 32, but right now they look old and slow.

Meanwhile, the Bombers traded away young, gifted Gavin Walls for a knee-injured Canadian defensive end named Stan van Sichem and they still need a real middle linebacker.

They lost two good young receivers to the NFL in Dudley Guice and Titus Ryan and their new quarterback was a backup in Saskatchewan who has one career start, has thrown only 152 CFL passes and was unwanted in Edmonton.

Are the 7-11 Bombers a better team yet?

Just asking.

On the bright side for Minnesota Vikings fans, the Vikes should get quarterback Brett Favre back.

It’s true, if you believe Larry Fitzgerald Sr., the sports editor of the Minneapolis Spokesman-Recorder, who looked me right in the eye last Sunday on press row at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul and said, “Yeah, he’ll be back. Of course, he’ll be back.”

That’s the good news for Vikings (and, yes, I believe Larry because he probably has the best NFL contacts of any media guy in, well, maybe the world).

Now the bad news. After losing versatile runningback Chester Taylor to the Chicago Bears, it’s very likely the Vikings won’t get veteran LaDainian Tomlinson either.

Tomlinson, who was released by the San Diego Chargers after an injury-plagued 2009 season, visited with the Vikings on Wednesday night and Thursday morning and then moved on to visit with the New York Jets.

And the Jets didn't spend any time fooling around.

After visiting New York on Thursday evening and Friday morning, Tomlinson had planned to return home to San Diego on Friday afternoon. But the Jets convinced him to stay and according to fanhouse.com, Tomlinson, 30, will be offered a two-year $5 million contract that could be made even sweeter with as much as $3.5 million in incentives.

Tomlinson, who ranks eighth on the NFL's all-time rushing list with 12,490 yards and second with 138 career rushing touchdowns, told the Jets he would go back to San Diego on Friday night, speak with his wife and make a decision. It’s likely he'll choose the Jets where he will be the No. 1 back. He will not be No. 1 in Minnesota. That role belongs to Adrian Peterson and it isn’t going to change soon.

However, Tomlinson told reporters in the Twin Cities on Friday: "This is not the end of the road at all. I'm not retiring. So I am very excited. I really believe I am going to have that opportunity to win a championship."

With Favre back, the Vikings are certainly as much a threat to win it all as the Jets next season. When it comes to acquiring Tomlinson as a No. 2 back, Favre is probably the only thing the Vikes have in their favor.

*               *            *

8:30 a.m., Sunday, May 14: The San Diego Union-Tribune is reporting that it is "100 per cent certain," that LaDainian Tomlinson will sign with the New York Jets.

There were nine NHL games on Tuesday night in the NHL, five more on Wednesday and 10 more on Thursday night. After 14 days at the Olympics, the NHL has a lot of catching up to do. It will be difficult to keep up.

In the meantime, from new rules regarding hits to the head, possible new shootout rules and a lawsuit against the former owner of the Phoenix Coyotes, this is just about the busiest March of the decade.

Let’s look a little deeper inside the NHL…

1) On Sunday, the 92-CITI-Sports Machine was in St. Paul, Minn., to watch the suddenly strong Calgary Flames drill the Minnesota Wild 5-2. So what suddenly changed in Calgary?

Simple, as we told you on Sunday, Flames head coach Brent Sutter put Jarome Iginla on a line with Rene Bourque And Matt Stajan and on Sunday, the line combined for 10 points as Iginla had his 10^th career hat-trick.

Not bad, for only the second game together and they were pretty darn good on Tuesday night in their third game together. Bourque and Iginla each scored once and added an assist and the Flames won (4-2)  a rare one in Detroit.

2) If there was one team that would frighten me if I were the San Jose Sharks or Chicago Blackhawks, it would be the Detroit Red Wings.

The Wings have been banged up all season long. For months, they had at least three of their best players out of the lineup. They were half a hockey team for much of the season. But now they’re healthy, the playoffs are beckoning and if Jimmy Howard gets the job done, the Wings could be the sleeper of the playoffs.

But first, they have to play better than they did against Calgary on Tuesday night.

3) This weekend while I was in St. Paul, a number of hockey experts watched the newly formed Iginla-Stajan-Bourque line and wondered aloud which line was the best in the game today.

A couple suggested Alexander Ovechkin-Alexander Semin and anyone on the other side, but the consensus seemed to be that the best line in the NHL was New Jersey’s No. 1 line of Zach Parise, Jamie Langenbrunner and Winnipeg’s own Travis Zajac.

If nothing else, it’s one of the few lines in the NHL that has been together for most of the season and it provide salmost all of New Jersey’s scoring.

ST. PAUL, Minn. – As the Calgary Flames whipped the Minnesota Wild 5-2 on Sunday afternoon, the NHL started its run to the playoffs.

Most NHL teams now have 16-18 games left this season. We’re solidly past the three-quarter-pole and there are just five weeks left in this rather odd season.

After a 14-day break for the Olympics, the NHL is loading up on games and there will be some tired superstars once the playoffs roll around. Until then, let’s take a quick look around The League.

1) Monday night (actually Tuesday morning at 12:10 a.m.), I’m Eric Nelson’s guest on the Eric Nelson Show on 8-3-0 WCCO radio in Minneapolis and we taped the segment on Sunday at the Xcel Energy Center.

Eric asked me to set the NHL’s final four. I told him, Chicago and San Jose in the West and Pittsburgh and Washington in the East. He then asked, “Which teams are the darkhorses?” I told him that question was more fun.

In the West, Detroit is finally healthy and they could be scary when it counts if Jimmy Howard can get the job done in goal. I like Vancouver, too, if Roberto Luongo doesn’t choke like a dog as he did last year.

In the East, I like Buffalo and New Jersey because they both have great goaltenders (Ryan Miller and Martin Brodeur). As Brian Burke always said, “We call it the Stanley Cup playoffs because we can’t call it goalie.” He may not have been right about Ian White, Alexei Ponikarovsky or Matt Stajan, but he’s right about that.

2) There was a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s when a Canadian player in the NHL’s Top 10 in scoring was a rarity. A decade ago, the stats were dominated by Europeans.

However, while Euros such as Alex Ovechkin and Henrik Sedin are at the top of the NHL’s scoring stats today, there are now five Canadians and one American in the Top 10. What is even more interesting is that Pittsburgh’s Sidney Crosby took over the goal-scoring lead on Saturday with his 43^rd and 44^th and young Steven Stamkos scored his 40^th of the year on Saturday. Youth is also being served.

Maybe that Canada-U.S. Olympic final will be a trend, not a fluke.

3) Metis star Rene Bourque hadn’t scored a goal in 15 games until Calgary Flames head coach Brent Sutter put him on a line with Jarome Iginla and Matt Stajan. You’d think it was the return of the Hot Line.

Sunday night at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minn., the Bourque-Stajan-Iginla line combined for 10 points as the Flames drilled the Wild 5-2. Iginla had three goals and an assist, Stajan had two assists and Bourque, suddenly playing the best hockey in more than a month, had a goal and three assists.

The Flames have been struggling, but since Sutter created this line, Calgary has won two straight solidified their hold on ninth and are now only one point out of eighth and two points out of seventh.

At this stage of the season, a simple move like a line change can positively alter a team’s fortune. Sutter’s decision to create the Bourque-Stajan-Iginla line might have been the move that gets Calgary into the playoffs.

It was trade deadline day in the NHL Wednesday and it was a good day for… the American Hockey League’s Manitoba Moose. Amazing.

Moves by the Moose’s parent club, the Vancouver Canucks, meant that Vancouver’s AHL affiliate got to add centre Yan Stastny and veteran defenseman Brad Lukowich. That just about summed up the 2010 NHL trade deadline day. It didn’t do much at the NHL level, but quite a lot at the AHL level.

It also meant that the Ottawa Sun’s 300 rumours were all wrong. Or made up.

There were a record 30 trades made on deadline day involving 55 players and 27 draft picks and not one of them could be called a blockbuster. In fact, here was the trade deadline in one, single word: Dull.

Of course, that’s what a salary cap will do.

Because of the cap, instead of taking a big plunge in a search for stars that could lead teams to a Stanley Cup – oh, yeah, and cost a lot of money, too — the buyers made a lot of small deals that didn’t change their cap levels much. That’s why, after making seven small deals and being well under the cap, the Phoenix Coyotes were Wednesday’s big winners.

That didn’t make the other NHL owners happy, but by adding a bit to their own payroll, the Coyotes got considerably better. They acquired Derek Morris from Boston, Wojtek Wolski from Colorado, Mathieu Schneider from Vancouver and Lee Stempniak from Toronto. Sure, when a team the league bought for $140 million is likely going to lose between $50 million and $70 million this year, it would definitely piss off the some of the owners of other NHL teams because they not only have to foot the bill for the losses, but also to improve the club.

Of course, if the Coyotes don’t make the playoffs, they’ll lose the $70 million end, not the $50 million end. With only six weeks left in the season, the players acquired at the deadline won’t really cost that much.

Meanwhile, deadline day was a perfect time to illustrate the wait-until-next-decade attitude of the Toronto Maple Leafs. On Tuesday the Leafs dealt Alexei Ponikarovsky to Pittsburgh for defenseman Martin Skoula and middling prospect Luca Caputi.

The Leafs then sent Skoula to New Jersey for a fifth-round draft pick. In other words, the Leafs sent a big forward who will play on a line with Sidney Crosby – and was probably their best player — to Pittsburgh in exchange for a fifth-round pick and the slow, journeyman Caputi.

Now isn’t that an illustration of the state of the Toronto Maple Leafs?

Deadline day was good for something.

If there was one thing we learned from that wonderful Olympic hockey tournament it’s this: Winnipeg’s own Jonathan Toews could very well be the best hockey player in the world.

Amazing then, that Toews was the 13th forward selected to Team Canada and for many of the Eastern experts who "pre-picked" their own Canadian Olympic teams, Toews wasn't good enough to be considered.

But then came the Olympics and Toews proved how good he was. Especially when the gold medal was on the line. The captain of the Chicago Blackhawks not only scored Team Canada's first goal in the gold medal game, but for the next 2 1/2 periods, he was, consistently Canada's best player. In the end he was named the tournament's top forward and a tournament all-star, but more importantly, he had an Olympic gold medal and Canada was back on the top of the hockey world.

So no, Jonathan Toews is not the best goal scorer or the best passer or the best checker or the best penalty killer or the best power-play specialist or the best shooter or the best stickhandler or even the best captain. But he’s in the Top 3 in every one of those categories and if you throw in winner and leader, then he IS the best hockey player in the world.

What a spectacular hockey game yesterday. Sidney Crosby scored the winner midway through the overtime period to give Team Canada a 3-2 win over the United States in exactly what a gold medal hockey game should be. Fast, tough, skilled, brilliant, close.

Winnipeg’s Jonathan Toews, a tournament all-star, scored Canada’s first goal, Corey Perry scored the second and the Canadian defence hung in long enough to allow Canada's greatest young player to win it.

As a result of that game, Canada finished the Vancouver Games with a national record 26 medals: an Olympic record 14 golds, seven silvers and five bronze medals, good for third place in the medal race and tops in golds. And it came to end after one of the finest hockey games ever played.

Interestingly, Crosby was the hero yesterday, but no one had any doubt that U.S. goalie Ryan Miller was the best player in the tournament.

While Crosby’s overtime winner gave Canada a wonderful victory, Miller was named the tournament’s most valuable player and the best goaltender in the Olympics. Miller also made the final tournament All-Star team alongside teammates Brian Rafalsk and Zach Parise, Canada's Toews and Shea Weber and Slovakia's Pavol Demitra.

Once again, it was a sensational gold medal game — a sensational game that ended a sensational tournament. Twenty years from now, you'll remember where you were when Sid the Kid scored the winner.

Bravo.

Someone asked me on Saturday if enjoyed the Olympics. Well, that's a tough question. I loved the hockey. Period. I enjoyed some of the sports with the mute button on. Others? If the Olympic gold medal was on the line in a judged sport (figure skating, aerials, moguls, short-track — which shouldn't be a judged sport but from what we saw in Vancouver, it is — etc.) and they decided to hold it in my backyard, I wouldn't open the drapes to watch it. Judging at every possible level of sport is so frustratingly phoney, it's just impossible to watch without laughing out loud.

Other than that, I did enjoy the Games. Especially ski cross, snowboard cross and long-track speedskating. I also enjoyed all of them with no sound on the TV. Frankly, if CTV and TSN had just one announcer  per sport — one of the professional play-by-play guys like Rod Black or Rod Smith (especially Rod Smith) — the Games would have been quite enjoyable. But when Catriona LeMay Doan or one of the other fawning, bullshit artists opened their mouths, I wanted to gag. Thank the lord for the mute button.

As my pal Mike Richards said on the Fan 960 in Calgary last week, "Here was a typical comment by one of the CTV analysts: 'Yes, Rod, what a wonderful athlete who has worked so hard all her life for this special moment because you know Rod, winning is better than losing. That's right Rod, winning is good. Losing isn't good. We like winning, Rod. All Canadians like winning. She likes winning. Winning is better than losing.'"

Click.

After all that phoney pre-Olympic hype, the I-Believe-Own-the-Podium hogwash, the Games were a nice diversion. But will this be it for big, popular Winter Games?

These Vancouver Games were huge. It was in North America, in a great city, and the North American media was all over it. But with newspapers struggling mightily, with TV networks (in Canada, at least) cutting to the bone and losing big money and with all those shoestring internet operations trying to save every penny to pay for content, the people who travelled to Vancouver aren't going to go to Sochi, Russia in four years. Especially for a Games that will be held with a nine-hour time difference (to CST).

Meanwhile, only three cities in the world have shown any interest at all in 2018.

It was fun to celebrate Canada's performance in Vancouver. After all, it was an Olympics held in prime time. But do you remember what happened in Turin? Did you watch much of that at all hours of the night? Will you stay up to 3 a.m., 4 a.m. to watch in Sochi? And if the NHL chooses not to participate, will you even bother with hockey?

A lot can happen by 2014, but right now, I'd say this Vancouver Winter Olympics was the last great North American party for a long, long time.

It takes no argument for me to agree with anything Bob Nicholson says. Except today.

As long as the IOC has decided to drop women's softball and not allow women's ski jumping in the Olympics, Jacques Rogge is right. You have to put women's hockey on notice. The Olympic tournament was a dual-meet at best and a sick joke at worst. As Canada and the United States continue to improve dramatically, the rest of the world gets worse.

Start with the semifinals. The U.S. embarrassed 2006 silver medalist Sweden 9-1 while Canada made quick work of Finland — the third best team in the world — 5-0. Heading into the final, Canada had outscored its opposition 46-2 while the United States had outscored its opposition 40-2. That's not a competition. It's a four-game default disguised as a hockey tournament.

On Friday, Nichoson did exactly what he had to do. He defended women's hockey. It's his job even though he knows he doesn't have a leg to stand on. Nicholson told the Canadian Press, "Rogge should watch hockey more than just at the Olympics because it is getting better."

Really? Rogge's position means his interest is in the Olympic tournament and only the Olympic tournament — as it should be. The rest of it doesn't matter. Canada and the U.S, have completely dominated women's hockey since the discipline was admitted to the Winter Olympics in Nagano in 1998. The only time the U.S. and Canada did not appear in the gold medal final was in Torino in 2006 when the Swedes (who seemed to be improving at the time) upset the U.S. and then got drilled by Canada in the gold medal game.

Since then, Sweden has gone backwards while Canada and the U.S. have improved even more dramatically than one might imagine.

"There must be at a certain stage an improvement, we cannot continue without improvement," Rogge said. "There is an improvement in the number of nations and we want to see this wider."

Women's hockey has a problem. There are only two Olympic-level countries. The IOC kicked out women's fast pitch softball even though a dozen countries were nipping at the heels of the dominant Americans. Once softball was dumped, you had to figure women's hockey was next on the IOC's radar.

Thursday night's Canada-U.S. game was terrific. The rest of the tournament was a horrible, sick joke. It was a waste of time, effort and money. This isn't 1930 anymore. If other countries can't compete after a dozen years and as Cassie Campbell pointed out on CTV, the funding in other countries has either stopped or been limited, then what's the point? Get rid of it.

Although, I'll admit, if the IOC decided to allow Canada and the U.S. to play a best-of-seven Olympic championship in 2014, I could go for that.