2021 NCAA tournament live updates: Scores and analysis from the first round of March Madness

INDIANAPOLIS — Maybe March Madness began for real Sunday evening, when two foreign giants playing for Illinois held possibly the merriest Zoom news conference in Zoom news conference history, a rollicking 15 minutes in which they went on and on and wonderfully on about their love for each other and epitomized why Illinois might win this whole damned NCAA tournament.

For the whole time they entertained a batch of reporters in little squares on the screens, Giorgi Bezhanishvili had his arm around Kofi Cockburn until it seemed the blood must have drained from the vessels. As the great global bridge of sport has struck again, a 7-foot, 285-pound Hercules from Jamaica (Cockburn) has wound up cohabitating in the American Midwest with a 6-9, 245-pound force (Bezhanishvili) who spent his first 14 years in Georgia (the European-Asian country with the extraordinary food) before the family relocated to Vienna (the one in Austria).

They’re a two-man, near-14-foot, 530-pound emblem of the energy of basketball’s internationalism, and they really got going when Bezhanishvili fielded a question about the second half of the Big Ten final Sunday, about how he replaced a foul-troubled Cockburn, gushed points and wreaked little booms from the scattered Illinois crowd, all while Cockburn cheered free of envy.

“It was amazing,” Bezhanishvili said. “It was amazing. A-maaaa-zing. It was so great. I can’t explain it, it was so great. It was amazing, man. It was a-maaaa-zing. It was amazing. Amazing. I mean, it was so amazing that it was amazing-amazing.”

Cockburn: “Amazing.”