Chapter 1: "First Four"I see Phil. And when I now see Phil? I see a man with a ball. Not just any ball: a basketball. But any man. You might even call him every man—though I do want to be fair to him. The everyman figure is a composite of specific ones, and fairness and truth close enough acquaintances a dispassionate observer would almost certainly call them friends. When I say I see a man, I mean I see a human being: singular like any other. Nothing more—but also nothing less. Something ordinary and something amazing. A world and a grain of sand.
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The odds of filling out a perfect March Madness bracket are so infinitesimal statisticians disagree just how infinitesimal they are. Disregarding the “First Four” play-in games—because honestly, who doesn’t—proponents of treating every game as a fair coin flip will tell you one in
nine quintillion, two hundred twenty-three quadrillion, three hundred seventy-two trillion, thirty-six billion, eight hundred fifty-four million, seven hundred seventy-five thousand, eight hundred and eight. This was, indeed, the estimate favored by Phil Fayeton himself, not just for its magnitude but also its precision; for its neat, edgy literalness—the way it accounted for every possible eventuality, from our alma mater’s landmark loss the previous season to their poetic redemption in 2019.
The best sixty-four college basketball programs in the country score invitations to the “the big dance” each year; it takes sixty-three single-elimination games to crown a tournament champion. That’s two to the sixty-third power, mathematically speaking, Phil would explain, rattling off each digit with memorial pride. After his first few public appearances, he googled a series of analogies to help contextualize a number of that size, as if to improve its marketability—almost like he was lobbying for it. Pick a single grain of sand from anywhere in the world, he’d say, and you’d be twenty-three percent more likely to find it again at random than to fill out a perfect March Madness bracket. He relayed such anecdotes with a specious kind of authority in his voice; Phil unironically trusted the internet in that natural, unexamined way it is easy to trust generally helpful things.
Copyright © 2026 by A. Natasha Joukovsky. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
