“My friend is sitting there,” said the man in the backward-facing hat, gesturing at the empty seat beside him.

“He’s not there now, is he?” I said, making a joke that I’ve made a thousand times.

The crowd swarmed underneath the TV like a living, breathing beast while the gaudily garbed superheroes of our age battled on overhead.

“Can you put the game on?” asked someone over there.

“Which game?”

“The basketball game,” he replied.

It’s March, and March means college basketball. The NCAA Tournament means a lot of basketball — 67 games in total. They don’t call it March Madness for nothing. There are games on CBS, TNT, TBS and truTV, and then you can also stream them on Max, Paramount+ and Fubo, so there’s a lot of TV, too, much to any bartender’s chagrin.

The now two guys in backward-facing baseball caps seated directly in front of me witnessed the exchange.

“Keep your head in the game!” said one of them, jabbing his fingers into his temples.

I looked at him, at the man requesting the channel change and then at the swirling crowd.

Was he talking to me? Or to them? I couldn’t really tell. And he could have easily been talking to his friend, or to the players on the TV. Who knew? But it was strangely prescient in its timing. Meanwhile, a couple was walking up and down the bar looking over every sitting person’s shoulders.

“Are you leaving?” they asked a couple just receiving their entrees.

“Are you almost done?” they asked another guy in a college sweatshirt that looked suspiciously like the uniform of one of the teams playing.

“Don’t force it!” cried the other backward hat-wearing guy in front of me so loudly that I literally jumped.

Was that for them? Or for me? Or for the guys overhead?

In the restaurant business, it’s not unusual for people to speak to the people next to them, and then to their server without ever altering their tone or volume. You’d be surprised how often one has to say, “Were you talking to me?” in the service industry. And then there’s the interpersonal conversation that never gets told to the server.

“Where’s our food?” they will ask, not realizing that they had discussed something amongst themselves but never said anything to their server. And then sometimes, the server just forgets.

“Focus on the task at hand!” shouted that other guy in the hat.

OK, now this was getting weird. It was like my own inner voice was coming out of the mouths of those two guys. Therapists will tell you that you must first recognize who it is, the voice of your inner critic. Maybe it’s a parent, an old lover, a teacher or a coach.

“Defense!” shouted the first hat guy.

But to me, it sounded a lot like “defensive.”

That couple kept stalking up and down the aisle.

“Excuse me. Sorry. Pardon.”

“Let the game come to you!” shouted one of the guys, turning his head in their direction.

Could that have been for them? It certainly pertained.

“Minimize your mistakes!” shouted the guys.

And it just so happened that they said it right as I made a mistake.

My mind screamed, “How could they know?” while my ego said, “It’s all in your mind,” both of which made my superego super happy.

But it didn’t do much for the guy whose drink order I just screwed up.

“This is a margarita?” he said, looking at the Manhattan that I had made.

I braced for the shoutout I knew surely was coming. I literally cringed. But nothing came. I looked up to where the two guys were sitting, and they were gone. Instead, in their place was that stalking couple. He pushed the detritus of a meal forward, while she set her purse right on top of it.

“What happened to those two guys?” I asked the newly seated couple.

“What two guys?” they asked.

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• That joke about the invisible friend suddenly doesn’t seem quite so funny.

• “In basketball — as in life — true joy comes from being fully present in each and every moment, not just when things are going your way,” once opined Phil Jackson, the renowned professional basketball coach and former NCAA Division II player.

• “What a liberation to realize that the ‘voice in my head’ is not who I am. ‘Who am I, then?’ The one who sees that,” wrote author Eckhart Tolle in “The Power of Now,” published by Novato’s own New World Library.

• It might be time for a therapist appointment for one bartender I know. Or a hearing test? I’m not sure anymore.

Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com