At our house, it’s March Madness time, and it’s a family tradition to make our picks and fill out our brackets for the men’s NCAA Tournament.

Let me start with a disclaimer — don’t expect this commentary to be full of knowledgeable sports analysis or, in fact, convey anything more than a basic understanding of the game of basketball.

I just fill out the bracket every March, because my mother loved doing it, and my husband (who really is knowledgeable about college basketball, but sadly not helping me write this commentary) loves doing it, and my twins (one of whom follows college basketball, while the other does not), also enjoy the tradition.

With nothing else to go on, my daughter and I make our choices based strictly on our gut and sentimental fondness for various states: this year, for instance, we both separately and astonishingly picked Kansas and Kansas State to go to the finals, because … well, I’ll get to that later.

It really doesn’t matter how you do it — the tournament is always such a toss-up that it is entirely possible for people like my daughter and me to walk away with more correct guesses than our much better-informed family members. That’s fun too.

As an underdog in the game of basketball tournament predictions, I also tend to pick underdogs in my bracket.

Last year, I favored No. 15 seed St. Peters, a scrappy school in New Jersey, not because I had ever heard of the team, but out of reverence for the original St. Peter, who Jesus showed — leading by example — that walking on water is no big deal if you have enough faith in yourself.

Knowing this led me to correctly predict that the St. Peter’s Peacocks would strut all the way into the phase of the tournament called “the Elite 8,” and boy, did I ever dine out on that for a few weeks.

But this year, I missed the Cinderella sweet spot, by not picking (like virtually everyone else in America) No. 16 seed Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU) to beat No. 1 seed Purdue in the first round of the tournament.

And as I watched the last ten minutes of the game (this is the only part of a basketball game that I believe is necessary to watch), I was never so thrilled to be wrong.

During that fourth-quarter stretch, my husband quickly filled me in on the fact that the FDU had only squeaked into the tournament at the last minute, and lots of people had picked Purdue to go all the way to win the championship, and (my favorite part of all) that FDU had the smallest team in the entire Division I league, with an average height of only 6-foot-1 for its team members.

“Purdue is in trouble,” he kept shouting, as we watched. “They might actually lose this game!”

He kept up a stream of expert color commentary, marveling about the mental aspect of the game: how free and easy and fast the FDU Knights (actual team name) were playing, while Purdue’s team and fans looked variously shell-shocked and even angry, even when they made their shots, because they should have been so much further ahead in the game.

In the meantime, I was on my feet, an instant, crazed FDU fan, screaming for them to win.

The 7-foot-4 center for Purdue — a guy named Zach Edey, who according to my husband is considered to be one of the best players in the entire league, was being swarmed by Knights a foot shorter than he was and wasn’t even able to get off a single shot in the last nine minutes of the game.

It was incredible to watch — the jubilation of the FDU fans, the team, roaring in strength as they ran down the clock to finish off the giants of Purdue, and the FDU coach, who only last year was at a Division II school, as he took in the triumph of his professional life.

It was mythic — David takes down Goliath, Gulliver-tied-up-by-the-Lilliputians time.

We’re all short people in my house, with my 5-foot-8 son the tallest one of us all. As I’ve always told my kids, small is powerful. And watch out for the underdogs. Keep your eye on the ones who have nothing to lose and everything to win. Purdue never saw FDU coming, and that was their undoing.

In the meantime, of course, my bracket is completely busted. And after a shocking loss by Kansas last Saturday, my daughter and I (along with all the good people of Kansas) won’t have the thrill of a Sunflower State finale to the tournament.

I’m personally disappointed by that because it would have given me the opportunity to tell more people I am actually from Kansas — a biographical fact I mistakenly downplayed for too many decades as I tried to pass myself off as a sophisticated coastal cosmopolitan.

Letting more people know about my Topeka roots would have been a cool Jedi mind trick to establish my own underdog credentials. Oh well, it’s never too late, I guess. I’m just a short little hayseed from Kansas, people. No threat.

And March Madness — it’s so fun. You should try it, even if you’re like me, and only like trying to guess random stuff in a silly annual competition with your family.

Just follow your gut and remember that winning is so much sweeter when you’re the only one who realizes you can do it.

Elizabeth Shepherd, the editor of The Beachcomber, is a forever fan now of the Fairleigh Dickinson Knights, even though they lost in their second tournament game to the Owls of Florida Atlanta, another team with a surprising number of what her daughter calls “short kings,” so it’s all good.