This weekend marks Selection Sunday. You may not give a hoot. But I sure do.

I think it’s safe to say that most sportswriters have a go-to sport or two. In my case, I was weaned on major league baseball and college basketball. My father had connections in both areas, and it was our way of life to find ourselves at both major league baseball games and college sporting events, football included. But between basketball and football the one that really took with me was college basketball.

I lucked out in my college choice because I hit Boston College just at the time when Bob Cousy was turning us from a school dominated by football and hockey into a school that found itself a regular visitor to postseason basketball. BC was 80-23 during my four years. We went to the NIT in my freshman and sophomore years and the NCAAs during my junior and senior years. I still think the 1966-67 squad, which went 21-3 and reached the regional final in College Park, Md., where we lost to Dean Smith’s first Final Four Carolina team, was as good as any team BC has ever had. And I still think Terry Driscoll is the best player in BC history. Dana Barros and Michael Adams, to name two, had better pro careers, but neither was better than Driscoll in college. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

As far back as age 7 or 8 I was intrigued by the NCAA Tournament. And this was in an era when televised college basketball did not exist. The NCAA final was televised on tape delay in 1963, and I well remember that Cincinnati-Loyola of Chicago game in which the Ramblers came from 15 back as the Bearcats’ stall-ball tactics backfired.

Though I was fortunate to be given the Celtics beat by Globe sports editor Ernie Roberts at age 23, and thus spent many a happy year covering the Celtics and the NBA in general, I never fell out of love with college basketball. I was the student play-by-play broadcaster for BC basketball during all my four years at The Heights. Over the years I took every conceivable advantage of my travels to see college basketball games, usually by myself. I mean, who else wanted to go to Texas-Arlington and Houston Baptist? (Although I did drive Eric Fernsten and Jeff Judkins to see Danny Ainge play at Colorado State).

A few years back I compiled a list of venues in which I had seen college basketball games, be they male, female, Division 1, Division 2, Division 3, NAIA, or junior college. The number stands at 191, and that does not include the five college arenas in which I saw NBA exhibition games (Wyoming, Brigham Young, Toledo. Ohio State’s St. John Arena, and Evansville). I had a fruitful 2016-17 winter, adding seven venues to the total: Emmanuel, Pfeiffer, Babson, Philadelphia U, Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center, Northwestern, and Alabama. Incidentally, of those 191, I have identified 94 as places of personal pleasure, and not game coverage. So, yeah, I care about college basketball.

I love the tournament because it is many things to many people. Yes, it is designed to crown an official champion, but it is far more than that. It is a multilayered event that provides opportunities for fulfillment for far more than the one team that will be cutting down the nets at the conclusion of the championship game. The way I see it, the NCAA Tournament reminds me of the Boston Marathon.

The Marathon has three distinct categories of competitors. There are the 30 or 35 elite runners, the ones who actually have a chance to win. They are placed at the front of the pack, so as not to be impeded by the masses. The NCAA Tournament likewise has its elite, the relatively small number of teams recognized to be capable of winning the requisite six games in order to become champion. That number generally falls into the 6-8 range, and this year is no exception.

The second Marathon grouping are the hundreds and hundreds of pretty good runners whose goal is to establish a new PR (i.e. personal record). They have no realistic chance of winning the race, but they are very good runners by any standard and they have their personal standards of success. The NCAA Tournament will contain a number of teams whose realistic goal is to make a regional or Round of 16, with an even more distant hope of making the Elite Eight. They may dream of winning, but they are realistic enough to know they just aren’t going to. But making the 16 would validate their season for everyone concerned.

The third Marathon grouping are the thousands whose goal is to finish the race. They can go home to Ashtabula, Asheville, or even Ashland able to brag they had just run the Boston Marathon and had lived to tell about it. Their NCAA equivalent are all those 13, 14, 15, and 16 seeds, most from one-bid leagues, who were thrilled just to make the tournament and who would be ecstatic to win a game.

There are many things in life we know, or think we know, and then we are really stunned to find out just how much about those things we didn’t know, or had never fully considered. For example, we know there is a college basketball aristocracy led by the likes of UCLA, North Carolina, Kentucky, Kansas, Indiana, Duke, North Carolina, etc., who always seem to put out teams ranging from pretty good to downright great. But I think we may have underestimated how their presence underscores just what a fruitless exercise the tournament would be if winning it all were the only goal of the participants.

There have been 78 championships. The Oregon “Tall Firs,’’ led by the wonderfully named Slim Wintermute (all 6 feet 8 inches of him), won the inaugural tournament in 1939. Eight schools have won 44 of those 78 championships. They are UCLA (11), Kentucky (8), Indiana (5) North Carolina (5), Duke (5), Connecticut (4), Kansas (3), and Louisville (3). Now consider there are currently 347 Division 1 basketball schools. This means that 56 percent of the available championships have been won by 2.3 percent of the pool. You want more head-smacking data? Those eight schools have combined for 106 Final Four appearances. Granted, scores of these schools were not playing big-time basketball (or perhaps were not even in existence), but it does demonstrate the scope of the challenge for the basketball proletariat.

Seven other schools — Cincinnati; Oklahoma A&M, now Oklahoma State; San Francisco; North Carolina State; Michigan State; Florida; and Villanova have won twice each. Now we’re up to 15 schools comprising 4.3 percent of the pool.

And who are some of the usual suspects this season? Oh, just UCLA, North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisville, Duke, and Villanova. It’s a pretty closed shop. Now perhaps you see what Gonzaga is up against, not to mention Mount St. Mary’s and Northern Kentucky.

Bob Ryan’s column appears regularly in the Globe. He can be reached at ryan@globe.com.