It happens every year.

The first rumblings are felt as thousands of fans get out their March Madness brackets and clamor to guess whom the next “Cinderella” team will be. Then, as the first weekend passes and a few lower seeds have advanced, the field is primed with a number of options as a couple of double-digit seeds have drawn first blood. ESPN pundits, the proverbial sharks in the water, coil their bodies in preparation for the next ratings feast that is created by schools like Florida Gulf Coast in 2013 or Cornell in 2010.

After the majority of teams have fallen and Cinderella has finally presented herself, they strike. An all-out media blitz is created as the nation’s prettiest loser is paraded as the second coming. She has shocked the nation while reaffirming America’s belief that anything is possible if you just believe in yourself.

Here is where the problem arises. How much of an underdog are teams like three-time national champion Connecticut and preseason No. 1-ranked Kentucky, who have made the Sweet Sixteen 27 times combined since 1990 and the Final Four nine times since 1996?

These are teams who were given their 7- and 8-seeds this year by the NCAA selection committee, a notoriously questionable entity.

Our need for a team to beat the favorite comes from the fact that “it makes the world seem just,” Malcolm Gladwell said to TEDTalks in an interview for its blog.

Gladwell is a writer for The New Yorker and is the author of “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.” He says that the while we would prefer to be in the position of power, if we can’t, then we want to be in the position of the underdog. But the minute resources are acquired and power is gained, “we want very much to believe that those things which we’ve earned will prove to be decisive in any contest.”

Essentially, once you have served your purpose as the underdog and risen to the status of the favorite, you have lost all purpose. Just ask the Wichita State Shockers. After shocking the nation (pun intended) in 2013 by advancing to the Final Four as a little-known 9-seed, they were met with doubt and retribution when they did not fall back to obscurity in the 2014 season and, instead, gained a No. 1 seed in this year’s tournament on their way to winning their first 35 games – the most successful start in NCAA basketball history. They were justly defeated in the round-of-32 by the newly-minted underdog Kentucky Wildcats, and not a tear was shed by anyone outside of Wichita, Kansas.

Our need to root for those who are deemed the underdog has fostered in an era of making any team who might be at a disadvantage someone who is immediately the favorite. When the majority of the nation is backing the team who “doesn’t have a chance,” when can we be sure that they are, in fact, still the underdogs? At what point does the underdog become the favorite and the favorite the underdog?

jredmon@mavs.coloradomesa.edu