I was walking in Madison, Wisconsin on Saturday afternoon when suddenly all the people disappeared. One minute they were there and the next: Kazaam! They were gone.

I thought of Brendan Leahy in St Joseph's CBS Fairview whose virtually unheralded achievement has been to bring a small northside school two successive All Ireland soccer titles. If Brendan was an American he would be a very rich man. Instead he's just happy.

I thought of afternoons when I stood in Belfield Park watching the late Doc O'Neill get a chill as another team full of frail but talented scholarship kids tried to play enough football to stay ahead of lumpers like Bray Wanderers. The Doc could have had summer homes in Florida and the Bahamas if life were different.

And Sigerson Cup days. Muddy sidelines and raw football. The Dessie Ryans of this world. The pure passion of the thing. All the blood, sweat and tears expended on Sigersons every year. There was nobody left in Madison to explain it all to.

The people of Madison had vanished indoors to watch their college basketball team, the University of Wisconsin's Badgers, make it to the final four of the national collegiate championships.

This is quite an achievement. The kids have defied the seedings and will have the memory of that forever. Their coach Dick Bennett will get a considerable raise on his estimated $750,000 per season salary. The college will be able to recruit a better class of hoopster in the future. Everybody wins.

They call it March Madness, this month long frenzy of colleges basketball which culminates in the next few days with the spectacle of some fresh faced kids riding atop a sea of shoulders and cutting down the nets at either end of the court for posterity.

March Madness. Unintentionally the hype has probably hit the nail on the head. In March, just when most students are chained to library desks, digesting dry texts for 12 hours a day the rail thin hoopster undergraduates go beserk.

From on high they begin to speak in tongues. They obsess about going to the Big Dance, they sweat blood for the right to be in the Sweet Sixteen, barter their kidneys to be in the Elite Eight, eat their young for a shot at the Final Four and french kiss their grannies for the chance at immortality and a national title.

It's a wonderful American phenomenon, one of those little cultural identifiers which the rest of the world cares not a fig about, but which Americans get all worked up about. Good luck to them.

At a time when the NBA is starting to wonder where its audience went, a time when the pro version of the sport is desperately scanning the horizon looking for the next Michael Jordan, the colleges game has gone from strength to strength.

There is irony here because more and more kids are jumping to the big money before they finish their college careers and many thought that this would erode the popularity of the colleges game. Instead it has evened out the standards and ratings are on the up again.

Colleges basketball coaches who can maintain winning programmes year in and year out, charming lanky kids into coming to their school and browbeating great performances out of them, those guys are a rare breed. Nobody touches them till they lose the winning touch.

This year, this week, the season winds up at the Canesco Fieldhouse a sentimentally designed retro-cathedral to basketball set in Indianapolis. A new chapter will be added to a competition which has a history and mythology compared to anything which sport has to offer.

It isn't perfect of course and when it comes to imperfection let this column not be found wanting in the matter of sanctimony. Put a penny in the slot and LockerRoom can cluck like a Mother Superior for three minutes. Here goes: Money is in the blood stream of the colleges game poisoning the sense of 1950s innocence which the marketeers cleverly spin for us. Television sells us a game that Norman Rockwell would have been keen on. The facts suggest that colleges, alumni, sneaker retailers and agents are frequently in breach of the amateur rules concerning colleges athletes.

The holy theory of colleges basketball of course is that nobody who puts on a pair of shorts gets a penny to put in his pocket. It's an impossible standard to set and so fraught with loopholes that the regulations covering it run to over 1200 pages.

Imagine policing this world. It is the problem which the GAA faces except magnified a thousand fold. The best basketball players are chased down obsessively from puberty onwards by coaches who know that recruitment is the key to keeping their jobs. During this pursuit coaches are supposed to remain chaste and pure. No inducements except basketball. Sneaker companies and agents come sniffing pretty soon afterwards. From a time a kid is fifteen or sixteen if he can sink a jump shot and think on his feet he has rich people massaging his ego, coaxing him hither and tither.

Around him money whips past like Autumn leaves in a hurricane. The NCAA recently signed a TV rights contract with CBS covering the eleven seasons from 2003 onwards. You'll need to sit down before you read the figure. Six Billion Dollars! Hold onto your hat there Bridie. That's right, for college kids playing an amateur game. Six Billion Dollars! Any wonder they want some.

And the kids look at the sneakers they help sell, at the arenas they fill, (here in Madison it's the 17,500 seater Kohl Arena), they look at the programmes and lifestyles they sustain, look at the ratings they pull in, at the manner in which the NCAA will molest its own game for money, stretching the length of time-outs for instance by 45 seconds so television can sell that many more ads. More than a few of them are willing to fumble about under the table until a sheaf of dollars hits their palm.

It's a pity but it's inevitable. Money brings its own progress and its own punishment. Merchants of doom say it will all fall apart. Six billion dollars is a lot of glue though. March Madness continues to be dizzying and compulsive, a festival of sport which has its own momentum and logic like those blitz competitions we used to play when we were gangly little kids in soccer clubs. Now there's something CBS might be interested in...