With Kentucky’s unfortunate victory in Monday’s national championship game, the 2012 NCAA men’s basketball tournament came to a merciful end.

To say that this was not a good year for my bracket would be a monumental understatement.  I’m pretty sure I could mathematically prove that a goldfish — a pretty dumb one — could have beaten me.

What went wrong?  Just about everything, including losing three of my Final Four picks in the first round and the last one in the second round.  Check out all these red boxes of failure:

I know, people say every year their bracket stunk, but most of those people are in the middle of the pack in their pool and sad they aren’t winning.  In a group with 23 family members, I came in dead last.

Pay particular attention to that number on the far right, the 2.37.  That’s my percentile out of all the people who signed up to do a bracket on ESPN.com.  Put another way, I finished in 6,296,953rd place.

But I wasn’t always this pathetic.

In fact, just two years ago I had a miraculous run that had friends posting Facebook comments like, “St. Mary’s though? Who makes that pick?! Dammit!”

Ahh, much better.  I’d like to thank the fine people at ESPN for preserving this super important data so I can relive the glory days.  Hopefully next year I can recapture the magic, or at least find a goldfish to pick for me.