You sports fans know we’re in the Crossover Season. Lots of moving parts.

In the pros, baseball is in spring training, the NFL is in trade/arbitration/free agency/pass-the-blame offseason, and the NBA is nearing the start of its third trimester.

Yawn…

Then there is college, where campuses might not have enough fans to go around.

Tennis.

Track and field.

Softball and baseball.

Bowling.

For some, beach volleyball. (We see you waving goodbye, Pac-12.)

Golf, for sure.

And in the Cucumber States, pickle ball. (Well, maybe one day …)

But Crossover Season has just one Real Season, one that counts, and everybody who’s ever been in a gymnasium knows that.

It’s college basketball. Until March Madness is over, it’s tough to make more than a token investment in anything else.

The men’s tournament started with eight teams in 1939 and grew with television, to 16 teams in 1951, to 64 in 1985, and eventually 67 games and 68 teams, from the First Four to the Final Four.

The women’s game and ultimately the tournament began to grow in the early 1980s. Check this out: the first Division 1 NCAA women’s champion defeated Cheyney State, 76-62, in 1982 in The Scope in Norfolk, Va. That would have been Louisiana Tech. Hometown team Old Dominion had been upset in the East Regional Semifinals, so the announced sellout crowd of 9,000-plus, thanks to corporate locals buying bunches of tickets, was a bit smaller than that.

TV ratings — CBS televised the title game as part of their contract with the men’s tournament — were miniscule. Still, the ball was rolling, and the Lady Techsters were the bunch that first kicked it down the road.

So Tech won the first one.

And the most recent Division I NCAA women’s champion, if memory serves, is LSU, a 102-85 winner over Iowa in the highest scoring final in the tournament’s history. That game was played before an announced crowd of 19,842 — and most of them were actually there — in the American Airlines Center in Dallas. ESPN viewership was nearly 10 million, a 100 percent increase over the year before.

Good times.

So now the March action is twice the fun for those who are fans of both sports. If you are a fan of only one, that’s enough. That’s how good this tournament-times-two is.

I have not, as a writer, covered an NCAA Tournament beginning-to-end in a hard-to-believe 34 years. So when I write about things that happened in the mid-1980s, let’s say, it would be like me, back then, writing about the tournament as it was in the early-1950s.

In other words, names I’d type today about those 1980s times — names like Loyola Marymount, Bobby Cremins, Bucknell, St. Bonaventure, Bob Knight and Dick Tarrant — would be like me going back 30-plus years then and typing Canisius and Bradley and Clarence Iba and Slats Gill, Phil Woolpert and Adolph Rupp and a youngish John Wooden. Bill Russell and B.H. Born.

Go much further back and you’re talking peach baskets and a jump ball after every made basket.

Time is the great mystery.

Things change. But that Thursday and Friday the first week of the tournament, four games in one day at each site, that’s the best Daily Double of the year.

And always the surprises, in a tournament that’s proven timeless.

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu