THE FRONT ROW WITH MARK NELKE: Thursday, March 17, 2016

There was a time when fans looked forward to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament selection show.

Used to be, the show was just 30 minutes long. Now it takes that long just for Charles Barkley to figure out how to use the touch screen.

Back in the day, if you had tickets to a subregional, you quickly found out who was headed your way. You’d rejoice, or moan, but either way, you’d run out and find a USA Today the next day to read up on who you would be seeing.

No wonder someone leaked the brackets during Sunday’s telecast, expanded this year to two hours — at the rate that thing was dragging on, some teams would have been late getting to their destinations waiting for CBS to tell them where they were going.

Still, for me, having made the road trip to somewhere (Salt Lake City, San Jose, Tucson, San Antonio, Washington, D.C., among other places) this time each year, nearly every year but a couple over the last three decades, the first weekend of the NCAA tournament is the best event ever.

Some would argue that going to the WCC tournament the week before in Vegas, and maybe sticking around for some of the other conference tourneys in Sin City is now better. I’ll have to reserve judgment until I try that one someday.

TIMES HAVE obviously changed since the mid-1980s. The first NCAAs I attended were in 1984 in Pullman, where six teams played, including eventual national champion Georgetown. That was back when Pullman was a regular stop along the NCAA trail. It hasn’t been back to Pullman since that ‘84 event — if it did, some work-study students would need to be hired to dust off the seats in the upper level of Friel Court, most of which haven’t been sat in since then.

In 1984, the tourney consisted of 53 teams. In 1985, the field was increased to 64, and it stayed that way until a few years ago, when it was bumped up to 65, and now 68.

In the “old” days, first- and second-round games in the West were part of a true West Regional. The teams that won in the second round at your site advanced to play each other the following week in a regional semifinal. And if the regional was nearby, it wasn’t out of the question to watch eight teams play one weekend in, say, Salt Lake, then see the two survivors — plus the two teams to emerge from the other West subregional — play again the next week at, say, the Kingdome.

Nowadays, in the interest of a “balanced” bracket, you still might get a few western teams sent to your site, but more than likely most of the teams will be from elsewhere in the country.

This year in Spokane, there’s three western teams (Oregon, Cal and Hawaii) out of eight.

And the two winners from Sunday’s second-round games won’t play each other the following week — one of them heads off to the South Regional, the other to the West Regional.

Also, it used to be that if you didn’t get a No. 1 seed at your site, then you got a No. 2. Nowadays, unless there’s a powerhouse team in your area that the committee decides to keep close to home, you’re guaranteed no better than a 3 seed.

This is the fifth year the Spokane Arena has hosted the early rounds of the men’s tournament, and will be the first time a No. 1 seed (Oregon) has been assigned to Spokane. Ironically, the highest-seeded team sent to Spokane prior to this year was Oregon, a No. 3 seed in 2007. In 2003, 2010 and 2014, the highest seeds sent to Spokane were a couple of No. 4 seeds each year. The second-highest seed in Spokane this year is Cal, at No. 4.

UNLESS YOUR team is Gonzaga, the odds of your team landing in your subregional are fairly slim these days. But that’s OK; every now and then some team at your site catches your attention for whatever reason — a team that you had never thought much about before.

Nebraska, with its inflatable mascot, “Big Red.”

UC Santa Barbara, with “Gaucho Boy,” who filled the role of mascot and cheerleaders.

Nobody had heard of Hampton until they showed up in Boise in 2001 with their entertaining band and cheerleaders, and proceeded to knock off No. 2 seed Iowa State in the first round. Hampton became the toast of the town; its cheerleaders got the crowd excited the next night at an Idaho Steelheads hockey game.

To this day, the sight of Hampton on a bracket, or during Championship Week on ESPN, reminds us of those couple of memorable days 15 years ago.

That’s the thing about this weekend — you never know what you’re going to see. The six games could turn out to be rather uneventful, or you could see something people still talk about more than two decades later — like Tyus Edney going coast to coast in 4.8 seconds as UCLA beat Missouri in Boise in 1995, then went on to win the national title.

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.