March Madness captures the moment. The moon dominates the earth, and earth is now lunatic. It started just before March with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s gained momentum since then.

Duke and North Carolina face off in the basketball Final Four and Putin and Biden face off in the Terrible Twos. Ukraine’s Zelenskyy is the equivalent of the St. Peter’s Peacocks, as he’s punching above his weight.

Ginni Thomas, wife to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, promotes the illegal election theory to now former President Donald Trump’s former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. She believes Biden is a tyrant and his election was fraud. And her husband takes the position that Trump’s communications with his staff and others about the election are off the table for the House Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.

Meanwhile, Duke basketball players contemplate the retirement of their coach, Mike Krzyzewski. He’s of Polish ethnic background and attended school in Ukraine Village in Chicago. Everything is connected in this March Madness month.

Krzyzewski’s players say he’s helped them become men. They’ve learned to step up their game, to meet new challenges. It’s interesting that the players and Krzyzewski observers frame his impact in those terms. He’s a man surrounded by women at home and young men on the court. He says that he and his family of four women, his wife and three daughters, are the “starting five” according to an article in the Harvard Business Review. The women in his life are “different from the world I work in.” They give him perspective.

Krzyzewski doesn’t coach guys who stick around for their college degrees anymore. He goes after the best players whom the NBA wants to grab after a year. Krzyzewski has to turn these guys into men really fast, and he says he’s accelerated how he works with his players.

Krzyzewski is outspoken for human rights. He says, “Black lives matter. Say it. Can you say it? Black lives matter. We should be saying it every day. It’s not political. This is not a political statement. It’s a human rights statement. It’s a fairness statement.”

The coach is also outspoken for democracy and voting rights saying that the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the capitol “was an insurrection. It went to the very fabric of this great country; the symbol for our democracy is that Capitol, and we allowed that symbol to be really just spit on and stepped on. It was a sorry day.” He further states that anyone involved in the uprising, including politicians, should be prosecuted. Does he include the wife of a Supreme Court Justice?

With Krzyzewski’s West Point background, his positions as a coach stand out from many in the NCAA.

If he really wants to have an impact on how America sees Black Lives Matter and voting rights and democracy, he can take one more step in his final year as coach and as a man who, at 73, lived through the Vietnam years and must be familiar with student dissent. He could create real madness across the NCAA, especially in southern states where his team often plays. How would this happen?

So many of us are caught up in college sports. Maybe for some it’s for betting purposes and the excitement of winning some bucks on the backs of players. For fans of the March Madness games, and let’s add football and hockey playoffs as well, it’s for love of the schools. Our fandom celebrates first the academic excellence that these colleges represent and then the excitement of the sports competitions. Can we agree on that?

But in the background to this March thrill is the madness!

The biggest, most magnanimous, most impressive action Krzyzewski can take in support of his players and the nation would be to encourage his men, and all the men and women in March Madness, not just to take a knee for democracy and human rights and voting rights, but to decline to play until democracy and human rights and voting rights are restored. Wouldn’t that shake things up? Wouldn’t that create a whole new definition of “March Madness,” as this is the time we go mad for what America should be upset about?

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.