State News basketball reporter Tom Keller covered MSU's postseason run last week in Winston-Salem, N.C., and was reminded why this is his favorite — and most fattening — time of year.

If you don't like the NCAA Tournament, I'm not sure we can be friends. I cannot sugarcoat this fact.

The first two days of the Big Dance are like every holiday rolled into one — flipping between games, I feel like I'm searching for Easter eggs while wearing a Halloween costume and lighting a menorah.

I start looking forward to the tournament about three minutes after the previous year's end, and now, by some heavenly intervention, my job affords me the unique opportunity to see it all up close and personal.

Jeff Green's highlight-reel dunk? Happened right in front of me.

All six metric tons of John Thompson? Sat within earshot.

Idong Ibok's gag-reflex elbow injury? Allright, so some things are better left unseen in person.

But those are the memories that fuel March Madness. That, and bracket-following — an insatiable compulsion rivaled only by Facebook.com. My colleague and roommate Eric Fish — for whom basketball ranks a distant fifth behind hockey, hockey, football and hockey — picked the entire Sweet 16 correctly in his bracket. Meanwhile, despite watching roughly 200 hours of college basketball this season (much to the detriment of my academic and romantic lives), I managed a mediocre 11-5 mark and picked two teams in the first round (George Washington and Albany) that lost by a combined 60 points. Next year, I'm just going to stop analyzing things and adopt my girlfriend's criteria — she has Georgetown in the Final Four because she thinks George is a nice name for a baby.

Since there's not much more I can tell you about the tournament that you don't already know, I've been asked to tell you about what it's like to be a sportswriter at the tournament. (I'm guessing this revelation has caused 90 percent of you to just stop reading. For the other 10 percent, stick it out — there will probably be a point in here somewhere.)

The thing you should understand about working road trips is that between press conferences and the games themselves, we're on a pretty regimented schedule. As a result, most of our nonwriting energy tends to revolve around getting food.

There's the press room, where anything remotely healthy is apparently outlawed by the Geneva Convention. It's almost as if sportswriters took a vote a while ago and decided, "Hey, we're already living vicariously through these athletes, why not just give up on ourselves altogether?" As the masses kept plowing through a never-ending supply of potato chips, ice cream bars and deep-fried bacon grease (only a slight exaggeration), I kept having flashbacks to "Tommy Boy" — I could almost hear the room getting fatter.

Since we were working well past midnight most nights, dining options outside the arena were scarce. But, on a tip from the hotel front desk, we stumbled across a hidden gem tucked away across the street — a 24-hour diner called Jimmy the Greek, which we ended up visiting several times. It was the kind of greasy spoon you could actually feel OK about eating at — enough fat to taste good, not enough to instantly obliterate your arteries.

The highlight of the weekend came on a walk back from one of those late-night meals, when a shady van pulled up alongside us in the parking lot. From the open passenger window, a gentleman resembling ZZ Top called out in a gruff mumble:

"You boys know where a strip club's at?"

Unfortunately, we had no advice to offer. But if those guys did find what they were looking for, I can only hope there was a dancer there named Cinderella.

It would be fitting for the season.

Tom Keller can be reached at kellert1@msu.edu.