After 48 games in four days, three straight days without basketball might be a harrowing prospect for some. To pass the time until Thursday night, maybe Seth Davis’ new book, When March Went Mad, will do the trick. In it, Davis chronicles the 1979 college basketball championship between Magic Johnson’s Michigan State and Larry Bird’s Indiana State. The Wall Street Journal offers an assessment here:

In Mr. Davis’s well-reported account, we see glimpses of the future routing the past. In an NBC network production meeting the Sunday between the semifinals and final, one producer wanted to lead the prime-time championship game broadcast with a feature on ISU’s ailing Bob King, only to be overruled by the executive producer of NBC Sports, Don Ohlmeyer, who saw clearly that the only story that mattered was the study in contrasts of Magic versus Bird — big school versus small school, urban versus rural, ebullient versus taciturn, black versus white — two otherworldly athletes who’d raised their respective schools to the pinnacle of the college game.