Well, it is 2021. We are still dealing with a major pandemic. But it does look like we are going to try to have a basketball tournament.

Some of you might have noticed, but this has been a really rough year for my website. In late March, I was told that my hosting option was no longer available, and so I needed to switch to a different option. But the option was supposed to have more functionality, so it was supposed to be a big win. So, since I really didn’t have a choice, I updated my hosting options.

So, the site updates, and it says everything was successfully setup. And I thought great – that is done.

A little later, Charlie and I decided that we would recreate the 2020 NCAA Tournament by playing each game through our own HORSE tournament. I would take the predicted bracket from the Bracket Matrix website, Charlie would pick what team he wanted to be, and we would play the game. We even put in some rules to try to protect top ranked teams by giving the underdog a letter or two to start.

That still didn’t save #1 Dayton from losing to #16 Winthrop or #2 Villanova from losing to #15 Northern Kentucky. #11 Richmond was making a run from the play-in game to the Round of 32. It even had a horrible moment for me when Charlie chose #7 Virginia over #10 Indiana. And with me down S to H, I went on a crazy streak and led the Hoosiers to a come from behind victory. You can not begin to understand the pain that put me in.

So, I decided that I would edit the blog with our imaginary 2020 NCAA Championship. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t log in to the Word Press page. I just tried to see what the blog looked like, and got a connection error. My whole webpage was no longer assessible. After a couple of hours of figuring out what happened, I gave up. I just couldn’t think any more about how there was no tournament and now there was no blog.

In a way, maybe it was all for the best. Could you imagine my horror if this had happened for real during the middle of the Sweet 16? It also was probably for the best if anyone was still following the imaginary tournament, because Charlie and I both lost interest somewhere in the middle of the Round of 32.

With the possibility that we might actually have a NCAA Championship this year, I realized that if I wanted to do the tournament, I have to fix this. And while it has taken most of the evening, I finally figured out the cause (I think). The hosting service change also literally moved the site to a new server – which made all my connections to my databases and my configuration files for my Word Press pages invalid. All the data was there, but none of the scripts was pointing to it.

I still have a long way to go – but it looks like I have at least restored the blog. I believe that I can fix the rest of the site, but it won’t be tonight.

I apologize that you can’t see the past standings. It looks like I still have close to a hundred files that I have to edit – it is a simple edit, but still have to go through all the scripts to make it. But the good news is as far as I can tell, all the data still exists – which also means that I should be able to set up the site to support the 2021 tournament – assuming the NCAA decides to have one.

I still need to think through rule additions – it would be reckless to run the tournament, and then watch as games get cancelled without no rules around it. Who would have ever thought that you would need to have that type of contingency. But lets keep hope alive. At the moment, it looks like we will have basketball in March. And if I can get my act together over the next few weekends, the Lunatic will be around as well.