It’s that time of year when office pools become the latest water-cooler talk while homework suddenly becomes second to filling out brackets.

That good old CBS March Madness theme song gets stuck in your head again. As annoying as it gets, every time you hear the jingle it warms your soul.

Forget about Spring Training. The NBA can wait. And hockey is, well, just hockey.

It’s that time of the year.

March Madness is here.

It’s the best sporting event in the world, period. There’s no ridiculous computer system telling humans who should play who. No overpaid athletes complaining that they don’t get the ball enough. Just good, clean, competitive, real basketball.

It’s everything a sports fan would want in a postseason. A win-or-go-home format that makes every game that much more important. A tournament in which any team has a chance to succeed.

Where else can you bring together family members, coworkers and teachers to get obsessed over the same sporting event? Where else can your American Idol-infatuated sister pick that crazy upset when ESPN’s college basketball “expert” didn’t even see it coming? Where else can you watch 48 basketball games in one weekend and actually be excited for every single one of them?

Now, it’s a huge statement to call March Madness the “best” sporting event in the world, but after examining the other sporting events, it’s easy to see that March Madness is unbeatable.

Fans from all around the world cheer on their country in the Olympics and World Cup, but there are just so many Olympic sports that it’s difficult to generalize the Olympics as the “best.” Plus, the World Cup only comes around once every four years.

Then there are the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl. Super Bowl Sunday has basically turned into a national holiday and it’s more recognizable worldwide than March Madness, but there’s just something magical about the beauty of basketball combined with the athleticism it takes to play the game through several rounds that makes it more enticing than the Super Bowl.

The MLB playoffs are an exceptional finale to every baseball season, but how often do we actually witness a memorable World Series? And while the NBA playoffs have become more intense in recent years, we just don’t see the consistent action March Madness brings to the table year after year.

The college football postseason has been tarnished by the BCS system, which completely takes away the human element from deciding which team is actually the best. It’s no random coincidence that more and more people every year want a playoff system for NCAA football that is similar to March Madness.

But most of all, people make sports special. And during March Madness, the players involved are the heart and soul of the greatest sporting event ever. When you see 6-foot-7 bruisers diving across the floor for loose balls, fans that show just as much passion and intensity as the coaches and players, and games that play out better than a movie script, it all makes March Madness a beautiful thing.