Since 1939, the cream of the College Basketball crop has converged in the month of March to decide which team can survive and advance to become the NCAA National Champions.
However, ever since 1977, the college hoops game has taken on a new complexion after 88 Staten Islanders got together to map their roads to destiny by creating the bracket.
While 64 teams aim to make their way through the Sweet Sixteen, the Elite Eight, the final four and then through the final, fanatics, statisticians and mathematicians alike plot their own unique paths through the bracket, selecting a winner and a loser in each of the 63 separate knockout contests
And with no complete bracket ever submitted verified, the task has been deemed impossible by experts and amateurs everywhere.
But just how impossible is impossible?
What does the math say?
If you filled out a bracket by selecting the winner of a coin flip, your odds of filling a perfect graphic would be 1 in more than 9.2 quintillion - not million, billion, trillion or quadrillion, that quintillion.
For context, there are approximately only 7.5 quintillion grains of sand currently located on planet Earth.
Still, if you know a bit about College Basketball, then your odds of success begin to shrink.
Built by the historic overall success of past brackets, the actual odds of making a flawless submission come in at 1 in 120.2 billion.
But while your chances of success have risen in this instance, a snowflake in hell still stands a better chance of survival.
According to the NCAA themselves, it would take someone filling in a bracket every single second of the next 3813 years to create 120.2 billion unique brackets.
With a population of 1.412 billion, China is the most populous country in the world. If you expanded China to 85 times the size and had every citizen of this new behemoth submit a unique bracket, mathematically speaking, a winner would then be found.
For what it is worth, the most successful brackets ever submitted were completed with 55 of the 63 games filled in correctly, a feat that happened on eight occasions during the 2019 tournament.
With all this in mind, we wish you well, even if the odds don't.