It's near the end of March Madness, which means casual sports fans across the North America, and in the Bay Area in particular, start caring about the National Hockey League. Well, maybe "caring" is too strong a word. Noticing? Glancing at the hockey scores and standings when they're done with the stories about minor NFL signings, and baseball spring training notes and box scores? Remembering that the NHL exists? The Stanley Cup playoffs are right around the corner, and they're what most of the non-die hard hockey fans really care about. The NHL regular season is mostly ignored by the sports-viewing public, a situation made worse by the fact that the NHL is no longer on ESPN (or rather, ESPN2 when they didn't have more important things to broadcast, like meaty, red-faced dudes named Magnus pushing Peugeot’s around a beach somewhere), but rather the Food Network. ...

It seems like, all across the network, folks were up to no good. Maybe it was all the green beer from last weekend... Gothamist spent the week writing about New Yorkers behaving badly: at the post office, at the Garden, and at the fertility clinic. Calvin Klein may not be misbehaving, but he's just a little dirty, and in a completely different way than some NYC kitchens. SFist had its share of misbehave-rs, too, like......

We're guessing most of you are hungover from St. Patrick's Day. We are too. But still, we're going to muddle on through our green haze and give you (drum roll please...) this Week In -ists....

It may have been a tough football season, but they were dancing down on The Farm last night.

In fact, they might still be dancing at center court in Maples Pavilion, savoring the Cardinal's 75-68 upset of third-ranked UCLA.

Despite not being ranked, the Cardinal have been lurking in the weeds all season, and Sunday night they reared up and took a bite out of the Bruins. The way that they won it was especially startling: rallying back from a 17-point first-half deficit to cut the lead to seven in the second half, then going on a 15-0 run over the next three and one-half minutes to take the lead for good. They shot 70 percent from the floor in the second half! Stanford coach Trent Johnson showed great coaching chops by moving swingman Lawrence Hill to power forward in the second half to negate UCLA's quickness, and Hill responded with 22 points.

It's that time of the year. The 2006 NCAA men's basketball championship tournament starts this morning at 9:20 A.M. PST, ushering in nearly a solid month of the best that college basketball has to offer. Sixty-four teams from around the country, from conferences of different sizes and configurations, wade into the dizzying fray of sporting unpredictability that has come to be known as March Madness....

So first, the good news -- your Trimethyldioxypurist happened on a swell place for a cup of coffee, one that we fully encourage you to try. The bad news? La Boulange de Polk, the place in question, is closed on Mondays. Alas, folks, you'll have to wait until tomorrow to try it. La Boulange de Polk is on, er, Polk Street, near Green. It is, in fact, just across the street from fave Polk......

Screw Christmas, today just might be the most magical time of the year 'cause it's March Madness time. We may have no clue as to who is going to win, but we do know that the next couple of weeks will definitely feature several last minute game-winning shots, shocking upsets by colleges we've never heard of, and office pools being won by elderly secretaries over basketball fans who claim to know everything there is to know about Wisconsin-Milwaukee. How big is the NCAA Tournament? Between time spent pondering office pools, constant checking of internet sites, and sick days, businesses claim that March Madness costs business 1.4B in lost productivity. Throw in the fact that the first day of the Tourney also happens to coincede with St. Patrick's day and well, SFist has been laying the groundwork to calling in sick by "coughing" as much as possible and whining about how bad we feel to whomever asked how we were doing....