The “GO BACK” button on my remote control was my best friend yesterday. I suspect it was for a lot of people who were flipping between the NCAA basketball tournament and the House Committee on Government Reform hearing on steroids.

Surprisingly, the hearing held my attention for longer chunks of time than the basketball games. The games lacked drama, but the hearings did not.

The morning testimony from the parents of children whose steroid use led to suicide was chilling. Mark McGwire’s emotional opening statement actually made me feel a little sorry for him, though that sympathy became fleeting the more evasive he was in answering the committee’s questions. The tension between Jose Canseco and the rest of the players was palpable, and, aside from McGwire’s “I’m not here to talk about the past, Schilling’s reference to Canseco as the “so-called author” was the quote of the day.

Back to the tournament, I realized I was in too many NCAA pools when I couldn’t remember who I should be rooting for in five of the first eight games. I just hope I had Utah beating UTEP in the $5 pool and not the $2 pool.

Speaking of Utah, this year’s first day of the tournament discovery was their center, Andrew Bogan. He’s pretty good — big, mobile, soft hands, can shoot the 3 and pass. Were he not Australian, I’d predict big things for him in the NBA.

Back in D.C. the players kept talking about doing whatever they can to help discourage steroid abuse among young people. Outside of Schilling and Frank Thomas, I have a feeling their efforts will involve as many tee times as O.J.’s search for the real killers.

The politicians started lecturing the players about being above the law, which meant it was time for me to go back to the games. The court in Boise gave me flashbacks to the last time Phish came to play at my college. At either end of the court, they’ve got this blue and orange bronco that looks like it was drawn by a Japanese anime artist. It’s Boise State’s home court, the same school that brought us the blue football field.

Meanwhile, the Congressmen were holding the Olympics up as the “gold standard” for drug testing, which is the equivalent of the Big Dig being considered the gold standard for public works projects.

By the time I stopped laughing at that concept, the hearings had moved on to a panel comprised of commissioner Bud Selig, MLBPA leader Donald Fehr and some sniveling, arrogant dweeb named Robert Manfred, who probably got flooded with phone numbers from the Congressmen after the hearing begging him to be their chief of staff.

As has been required in every Congressional hearings since Watergate, the committee kept asking Selig what he knew and when he knew it. Intentionally or not, Bud made it sound like he was too confused to determine whether baseball had a steroid problem until about a year ago.

The tournament resumed a short time later, and CBS quickly reminded me of its most maddening programming habit. The network regularly pulls us away from a game that’s in progress to send us to another game which five seconds later reaches a TV time out and goes to a commercial. Rather than send us back to the game we were watching originally, CBS subjects us to some CSI commerical for the 10 millionth time.

Speaking of repetitive, I returned to the hearing and there was yet another rep reminding baseball of its responsibility to the children of America. Being as concerned as it is about the messages professional sports send to our youth, I’m sure Congress plans to bring the commissioner back to ask him about beer advertising.

By 8:30, my brain couldn’t take the back-and-forth anymore. I could have sworn I saw Dennis Kucinich ask Bud Selig, in Spanish, about the diamond-and-one press on C-Span, while on CBS, the Gonzaga coach was yielding his time out to the Winthrop coach. It was time to stick with one or the other, and all of the early evening games looked like they might go down to the wire, so I gave the “GO BACK” button the rest of the night off..

All in all, Thursday was like eating Chinese food all day. It was entertaining and tasty at the time of consumption, but a half-hour later, it only left an empty feeling inside.

James Carville pretty much summed it all up in an interview on ESPN — at the end of Thursday, you had your transcripts of the hearing in one hand and you had your NCAA tournament brackets in the other. Today, you might as well throw them both in the trash.