The Local newsletter is your free, daily guide to life in Colorado. For locals, by locals. Sign up today!
This year’s men’s NCAA national basketball tournament was full of upsets that made for some exciting basketball games. Now that it’s all over, and the Duke Blue Devils continue to celebrate their 61-59 win over the Butler Bulldogs Monday night, the rest of us are likely wondering where we went wrong with our brackets. That’s not the case for Brittany Goshia, a 13-year-old from Mead, a small farm town between Denver and Fort Collins.
After her mother signed up and let her daughter make the picks, Goshia’s bracket placed first in one national competition and could end up winning a $58,000 car for her mother as a result, reports 9News. Goshia says it took her about 30 minutes to fill out her bracket.
All she did was look at the various teams’ rankings and make educated guesses about where they’d end up.
“I definitely looked at the rankings and who really had the potential to go, like Butler was on their winning streak, so I thought they’d keep that up for a while,” she explains. “But Duke was my favorite, so I knew they’d beat [Butler] out.”
Goshia’s bracket wasn’t perfect—like millions of other people, she had Kansas going a lot further—but hers was the highest-scoring in the contest, beating out hundreds of thousands of people from across the country.
It’s hard to know the exact odds of picking a perfect bracket, but the Christian Science Monitor writes that one blogger puts the odds at roughly one in nine quintillion, or about one in nine million trillions. That could be wildly exaggerated, but it shows that picking the perfect bracket is nearly impossible.