We all know the truth behind filling out our brackets every March, that they’ll all be busted within a few days after submitting them. But why has nobody cracked a perfect bracket yet, even with the tens of millions created every year?

Here are the three biggest contributors to the 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 chance of the perfect bracket being made:

• 68 teams, one dream. The sheer insanity that comes with the single-elimination style tournament, along with the sixty-three games that come within this three week stretch, leaves plenty of room for errors to occur in your predictions.

• Basketball itself is a game of inches. From the height of the big guys to the buzzer beater missing the goal by a small margin. Basketball is notorious for being unpredictable; the numbers are rarely guessed correctly, even for a single game.
• College basketball itself is anomaly-heavy. A lot of fanatics actually prefer college sports over the pros because they’re slightly worse, pressure gets to the easier, but they typically play for their passion for the sport, rather than it being their job. With sixty-eight teams in the men’s and women’s tournaments being just a group of college kids with the weight of their schools on their shoulders, it makes more room for whoever wants it more to come out on top.

But why do we still do it, knowing that the odds are unfathomably low? Because that’s the whole point. March Madness isn’t about winning your group’s bracket wager, it’s seeing a random 5th year senior that will be working an office job in a matter of months sinking 3’s like it’s nothing, or a school you’ve never heard of surprising a top team in the country.  It’s magical, and everybody deserves to feel an underdog story presented by these young men and women having their “One Shining Moment,” because a huge majority of people prefer these memories of watching these memorable games over winning extra cash from your friends and co-workers.