COMMENTARY : In the End, It’s Wake Forest, Arkansas, Kentucky and UCLA

Remember the days when being the No. 1 seed of the NCAA tournament was like being guaranteed a spot in the regional semifinals? You’d get a bye, then a chump, or perhaps two chumps. Lately, it was one chump, and if things got really bumpy, a mild test. If a No. 1 seed lost as early as the second round, it was larger than huge, it was incomprehensible. You could pack a pretty big suitcase if you were a No. 1 seed, unless of course your name was DePaul.

Those days appear to be history.

Imagine you’re UCLA. You’re feeling pretty good about your season. You’re talented and deep. John Wooden is front and center at many games, smiling proudly. You’re just about to get all those Eastern snobs off your back, particularly the boorish columnists who say West Coast basketball is soft as Charmin. But all of a sudden the pairings come up on the screen and -- boom ! -- Bob Knight and Indiana in the second round. Is this any way to treat the top seed in the entire tournament? Apparently so.

I must admit, I’ve been trashing UCLA all year -- saying they were going to fold like they do every year, particularly last year when they lost to Tulsa by a zillion -- but I was really starting to change my mind about the Bruins. More than any team in the tournament, I want to see UCLA.

Well, if you feel like I feel, don’t blink. Same goes for another top-seeded team, Kansas in the Midwest. It’s a minefield out there, and two of the No. 1 seeds could be gone before the first weekend of the tournament is over.

The NCAA men’s basketball tournament keeps getting more and more delicious because we have less idea every year who will win, and because the gap between the top four teams and, say, the 35th-best team has grown so narrow it’s almost closed. It’s difficult to tell a team seeded sixth (Georgetown) from a team seeded 11th (Xavier). And right off the bat, two of the four top seeds will probably be tested severely.

Kansas, after what should be an easy victory over Colgate, could easily lose to Michigan, the third-place team in the Big Ten that has two starters left from the Fab Five days. Or Kansas could lose to Western Kentucky, which only has a record of 26-3 and could easily beat Michigan in the opener. This is the second round!

UCLA, after disposing of Florida International, gets either Indiana or Missouri. Wake Forest and Kentucky seem to have been spared that kind of second-round challenge.

Of course, most schools in the field don’t get any breather. Start with Georgetown. Moments after the draw was announced, John Thompson said, “I feel our bracket is the toughest overall. But I’ve never liked any bracket we’ve been put in.”

The TV analysts agree with Thompson that his original group of eight is the toughest, but my bet is he likes this one less than most. Xavier has a bunch of seniors, is 23-4 and just trashed George Washington at Smith Center a few weeks ago. Of all the first-round matchups -- which include Temple vs. Cincinnati and Alabama vs. Penn -- the best is Georgetown against Xavier.

The second-round possibilities are the stuff television programmers dream of: Kansas vs. Michigan; UCLA vs. Indiana; U-Conn. vs. Temple or U-Conn. vs. Cincinnati; Virginia vs. Arizona; Syracuse vs. Arkansas; North Carolina vs. Florida; Georgetown vs. Michigan State.

While some unheralded Cinderella can pop up anywhere, Maryland -- a No. 3 seed in the West -- appears to have received a decidedly more desirable draw than the Hoyas. The elevation of Salt Lake City and the travel aren’t going to be easy on Gary Williams, but there’s no doubt Maryland would rather play Gonzaga in the first round than Xavier. In the second round, Maryland would get the winner of Texas-Oregon. And if you want to look way, way ahead, U-Conn. might be sitting there in Oakland, Calif. in the region final. The point is, there’s nobody in Maryland’s path the Terrapins simply can’t beat. The fear was that Maryland might draw one of those second-round opponents with five 6-8 guys, a team that could just lean on Joe Smith all afternoon. It didn’t happen.

For once, Maryland didn’t get sucker-punched by the NCAA, and for that we send a big wet kiss out to Kansas City. In fact, there’s almost no complaint with the entire 64-team field.

Okay, you can quibble a bit. I’d have given Arkansas a No. 1 seed over Kansas, considering Arkansas lost in overtime to a top seed in a conference tournament final while Kansas was bounced by a lesser seed in its conference tournament. And you could get somewhat irritated with the selection committee for taking six teams from the Big Ten, while taking only four from the ACC (poor Georgia Tech) in a year that the ACC was head-and-shoulders better than any conference in the country.

But that’s about it. Nobody out there can scream bloody murder, not even Georgia Tech (18-12) or Iowa (19-11) and certainly not GW (18-13). As Mike Jarvis told CBS, “If we’d won one or two more games, particularly late in the season, we would not have been left out.”

Final Four: Wake Forest, Arkansas, Kentucky, UCLA.