Not these Ohio Bobcats, no way. They weren't supposed to contend for much of anything this season. They were too young - too unschooled in the ways of Mid-American Conference hoops.

So coming into the MAC tournament, no one thought much of Ohio's chances of being the last team standing. The Bobcats were the No. 9 seed, a little-regarded team with a roster stocked with youth.

Contend for the conference title and its automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament?

Not these 'Cats.

Next season, maybe. Next season for sure. Coach John Groce would have them ready then. Yes, they'd be ready next season.

For sure.

But the young often have a way of surprising when pushed into a corner where their pride and testicular fortitude are tested. The young have two choices: grow into manhood quickly or make excuses for their shortcomings.

His face was flush; his voice muffled; each word guard David Kool uttered had been softened by the sadness that comes from seeing a career end -- a career he never wanted to see end, not end like this; not end in 66-64 loss, not end with eyes so moist that he had to fight back tears.

No tears on this public platform for Kool, the best player in the Mid-American Conference this season.

With an army of media in the room, he did his best to live up to his last name. He kept his cool, even though his reddened face did more than hint he was fighting hard to remain calm, an effort in personal restraint.

Kool left everything he had to give Western Michigan and its fans on the floor Friday night at The Q. He had been a one-man band, playing all the right chords in trying to spring an upset on the No. 2 seed. He had the Broncos within one break here or there from playing Saturday for an automatic berth in the NCAA Tournament.

He had performed like a player who wanted to leave an imprint on the MAC Tournament, just as Kool had left his imprint on the conference's 2009-10 season.

This is what March Madness is. This is what happens in the heat of madness -- outcomes as improbable as the sun setting in the east. Last second dramas unfold that create joy on one side, despair on the other.

If March Madness is the divine work of the sports gods, what month is?

For the gods surely must have their hands on things for games like the ones today at The Q. James Cameron couldn't have directed more dramatic endings than several games that played out here in the Mid-American Conference tournament.

Take the seedings and bury them in the graveyard two blocks from the arena, for if they meant anything, nobody paid them much mind. That's seemed apparent from game after game in the tournament: teams as even two yardsticks -- 36 inches both - their NCAA hopes resting on winning, their season itself resting on winning.

I was sitting around the pressroom inside The Q last night with a handful of other sports journalists. It was halftime of the Cavs-Spurs game, and we were talking sports -- what else would sports journalists talk about: the Argentine 

peso? -- but not a word was being said about the Cavaliers.

Now, we had an interest in how they were doing. I mean, they were playing Tim Duncan and the Spurs, and the Cavs were playing without LeBron James. But the Browns were what dominated our conversation.

We had just heard that team president Mike Holmgren traded a low draft pick for a quarterback, and we were discussing the merits of bringing another backup quarterback to Cleveland to compete with two quarterbacks who are, essentially, backups. None of my colleagues saw Seneca Wallace as an upgrade over Derek Anderson or Brady Quinn.

They reminded me that Anderson will be a former Brown before March turns into April -- a $2 million roster bonus will send D.A. into free agency, leaving Quinn as the team's No. 1 quarterback.

It's always a tough task to rate the performances of general managers, but just as sportswriters rate a player, they can't let the performance of the men who build these teams go ungraded.

Somebody has to be held accountable for these failures, particularly in the case of the Indians organization. Sportswriters can't give high marks to what Mark Shapiro has done with the franchise.

That's not my opinion alone; poor marks are the judgment of a media with a lot more national credibility than I have.

On its website, Sports Illustrated ran an article that rated general managers, and out of 30 GMs in Major League Baseball, Shapiro ranked No. 22.

"He has to be the most overrated executive of the last few years," SI writer Tim Marchman said. "His Indians were widely praised as one of the best-run clubs in baseball for years, but despite immense reservoirs of talent they've had two winning seasons in his eight years at the helm."

I'm not sure about the reservoirs of talent that Marchman referred to. Having covered the Indians as a beat writer for about five years, I didn't see that deep pool of talent. Sure, good ballplayers came through the organization, but few came here in the draft, an abject failure of the Shapiro regime.

I wish the total numbered 10 instead of two. But on EPSN the Magazine's list of the 100 best ballplayers in the bigs, the Indians had Grady Sizemore (No. 27) and Shin-Soo Choo (No. 69) make it.

Two Indians, not 10.

It wasn't important that neither man made the Top 20. With a roster of players in Goodyear, Ariz., it would have been nice to see more than two current Indians and maybe one or two fewer former Indians on the list.

I guess this says something about talent evaluation the past decade - or, perhaps more precisely, the imbalance that money plays in the game. For it's hard to keep high-end talent in Cleveland, which puts greater burden on the organization to grow its own.

Zydrunas Ilgauskas, of course he's coming back, isn't he? 

He'd better, because with Shaquille O'Neal on the mend, the Cavaliers need help desperately in the middle. 

They had discovered their shortcomings there in the playoffs last season. With Z at center, he couldn't alone handle the muscle inside of the Dwight Howard and the Orlando Magic, so Cavs general manager Danny Ferry sought help and picked up Shaq for a bucket of bolts and a case of Gatorade. 

With Shaq getting most of the minutes in the middle, the Cavs would now be able to double-team the bulkier NBA centers, freeing LeBron James to do what he does better than any player not named Kobe Bryant: dominate the endgame. 

And Ferry's decision to add Shaq was a smart move. Indeed, he had been the incredible force inside. His presence helped the Cavaliers forge a comfortable lead in their attempt to claim the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference. 

The fresh faces filled the row of seats on the outside of the auditorium's main floor. They were teenagers, boys and girls from public high schools in the Metro Cleveland area, and they had come downtown to the public library to listen to a man who, for the majority of them, was just a name from history.

To them, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was as unfamiliar as Earl Warren or Nelson Rockefeller or Spiro Agnew. All played starring roles in U.S. history, although perhaps their significance to boys and girls of a certain age was because somebody like me told them so.

Yet as I looked at the faces of youth, I saw an enthusiasm, a real interest in what the giant of a man on the stage in front of them had to say. Abdul-Jabbar, 62, said plenty this day, too - to these teens and to anybody who cared about the futures of these teenagers.

Abdul-Jabbar, the former NBA star who made the sky hook famous, knows that what people do today can shape how a teenager turns out tomorrow. In a room packed with the melting pot that reflects Cleveland, he could have told the audience of 600 that it takes a village to raise a child. He didn't.

No reason to repeat that tattered saying. It had its day, and that day wasn't worth revisiting - not with the challenges that confront teens of today. Their challenges are the rest of society's challenges, Abdul-Jabbar reminded everybody.

It won't rest with teenagers to resolve those challenges, he said; it will be the adults - the parents, the teachers, the clergy, the mentors: any man or woman who cares about the boys and the girls who embody this country's future.

Whatever that future might hold, the old have a stake in it.

"Their job is a hands-on job," Abdul-Jabbar said. "Don't give it over to Nintendo and MTV."

Forged from his experiences, his were inspirational words. While absent a booming baritone, his words still drew applause from the crowd, most of whom were decades beyond their wonder years -- men and women, black, white and Latino, deep into life after high school; adults who remember Abdul-Jabbar as the best center of his era and not as the author, the intellectual and the social critic he's evolved into.

But those latter roles were what had brought Abdul-Jabbar to town, a lecturer for the library's "Writers & Readers Series." He talked about his latest book "On the Shoulders of Giants," conversations with iconic figures of his generation.