Sometimes people tell me they are a little surprised that my instagram stories sometimes include basketball scores and celebrations.

But, I mean when your amazing daughter’s awesome boyfriend plays, you might start watching college basketball.

When he moves to Japan to play for the Fukushima Firebonds, you might get excited about how great the team is doing!

When you and your daughter have to be awake in the middle of the night to take care of the dog anyway, she might finally figure out how to stream the games on her iPad.

When the Firebonds have a Wednesday night game, your daughter might put it on Wednesday morning…

And that’s how this morning, as I was drinking my coffee, I ended up watching a little bit of morning basketball.

“Wouldn’t it be funny,” I said to my daughter, “if this is the way people had to learn Japanese? Just by listening to the game?”

See, it seems my kids are all learning Japanese. My daughter travels there and learns from her boyfriend and his family. One of my sons is taking Japanese in college, and my other son just seems to learn languages randomly whenever he is interested in them.

But my brain isn’t great at learning languages right now. So I am glad I already (kind of) learned the language of basketball from watching a few years of Oberlin games. Otherwise, I’m not sure I could learn it when everything is in Japanese.

I did pick up “danku” after a slam dunk, and my daughter pointed out when the anouncer said a player was getting a “sekandochansu” at a foul shot.

Perhaps I will learn some Japanese at some point. After all, I used to think I’d never understand (or care about) basketball… and tonight I am going to make my first ever March Madness bracket for the school challenge.

After I pick a bracket name, of course. I mean the names that other people have are amazing…

I have a few ideas, but when I tried to tell my ideas to my youngest son tonight he was annoyed. He said, “Maybe you should start watching basketball then?”

I said, “I do watch basketball! I just watched it this morning!”

“What basketball are you watching?” He said this, already knowing.

“The Fukushima Firebonds.”

Duh.

But just you wait. My bracket might surprise you… But first I have to pick my bracket name…I’ve got some great choices… not sharing yet… but let me know if you have one I should consider.