Three days ago, one of the greatest sports days of the year passed with little fanfare or acclaim. We woke up, flipped the calendar from February to March and – voila! – the sports fan in everyone was redeemed for a month of brutal weather and even worse sports.

Finally, here comes March, and not a minute too soon. Feb. 28 to a sports fan is a last night in jail, a sign that a ride out of an athletic purgatory has arrived. And we all gladly jump on.

February leaves sports fan stranded in a desert of options every year. Gone is football, and with it Sundays on the couch and Saturdays in the Dome. College basketball grinds through its fourth month, teams jockeying for position in conference standings with the urgency of a grandmother puttering along in the right lane.

If that bores you, then there’s the NBA smack-dab in the middle of its season. Those games have been used as a cure for both insomnia and narcolepsy.

And that’s pretty much it for February, besides maybe the Daytona 500. Thank God it’s not a leap year.

Now, just when we need it most, here comes March, a rush of brackets and buzzer beaters, Cinderellas and choke artists, all packaged with the promise of something new.

Here comes March, and first it brings college basketball’s conference tournaments. Sure, the big-time matchups, the games in Madison Square Garden and the ones with Dickie V courtside, are great, finally shedding some luster on a dreary sports landscape.

But the real excitement comes from no-name teams playing in no-name places for the right to represent their no-name conferences. They’re playing for their 15 minutes in the national spotlight, for the right to hold a slingshot and see their name next to some basketball Goliath.

Here comes March, and with it two weekends on the couch with a red Sharpie and a wrinkled piece of paper that will likely end up in tatters, the basketball bonanza called the NCAA Tournament. If you’re lucky, it might make you a few bucks and some bragging rights. You’ll probably cheer hardest for Syracuse, but you’ll also have 32 new favorite teams for two days.

You’ll hang on every hoop, every whistle, every squeak of the sneaker for 12 hours two Thursdays from today. You’ll curse players you didn’t care about in February, and you’ll exalt players you’ve never heard of. Then you’ll get up and do it again on Friday and thank God it’s March.

Here comes March, and though it may be snowing like hell outside, the games on our television sets tell us better days are coming. ESPN showed a baseball game yesterday. The sun-splashed scenes were so beautiful it almost made you ache, but it let you know the agony of winter, no matter how immediate, will soon be dashed.

Nothing makes you forget about scraping ice of your windshield like spring training, perhaps the two prettiest words every strung together. If it’s possible for you to think about spring training without smiling, then I feel bad for you, because you can’t really appreciate what makes March so great.

March, for all its wondrous possibilities, isn’t all about beginnings or triumph. For all the joy and excitement, 323 Division I teams’ seasons will end with gut-busting, heart-wrenching disappointment. About three seniors playing Division I college basketball will walk off the court with their heads high; the other 1,000 or so will end their career as losers.

Even the most lovable 13 seed that makes us tear up our brackets by winning a couple of games, for all it accomplishes, invariably goes home a loser. We know that’s not quite right, but technically, it’s the cold, hard truth.

It’s this immediacy, this drama, that defines March. It is sports in its greatest form – all the spectacle, all the duality of winning and losing that make us love games.

All of what’s missing from February.

Here it comes.