In five Final Four appearances, Georgia and coach Andy Landers have never won a national championship.

Because all the rest of the SEC teams are sick of hearing about Te ...

Whew, almost slipped there. This is about Georgia and Auburn and LSU and Mississippi State and Vandy and everybody else in the Southeastern Conference, a league that has played terrific women's basketball for such a long time but never has had a national champion ... except for ...

Anyway, you're all thinking about your brackets now and daydreaming about how, maybe, if so-and-so could just hit her jump shot more consistently and so-and-so could play defense like she did in that one game in December two years ago ... maybe, that bunch you love so much could make a run in the NCAA Tournament.

Your head fills out one bracket, your heart does another. You know your heart's bracket borders on the moronic, but you do it anyway. You go to bed thinking about how it could work, how anything is possible -- even though you went through this same nonsense last year only to be slapped silly with reality. Because you believe that reality, this year, could change.

Funny thing is, maybe you don't think fans of those hot-shot "our-league-is-always-better-than-anyone-else" SEC teams get their hearts broken like, say, those poor, perennial low-seed dreamers.

After all, the SEC has sent Alabama, Auburn, Arkansas, Georgia, Vanderbilt and some other team to the NCAA Final Four -- in total, SEC teams have made 21 appearances in that event.

Last year, the SEC wanted an unprecedented eight teams in the NCAA field and, la-dee-da, it got eight teams in the NCAA field.

A certain "prohibitive favorite" got knocked off in a regional final in one of the most thrilling women's NCAA Tournament upsets ever, and what do you know? The SEC still got a team, Georgia, into the Final Four.

It's like the rest of the leagues can't develop an antibiotic for the SEC virus. It just mutates, becomes immune to whatever tries to kill it. (Nobody has come up with any lasting penicillin for the Final Four's Louisiana Tech-itis, either, but that's another story.)

Since the NCAA Tournament began in 1982, there has been at least one SEC team in the Final Four every year except one. And while most people will remember March 28, 1992, as the day Duke's Christian Laettner hit that shot to beat Kentucky in the men's regional finals, it was also the day -- the only day -- the SEC women struck out on making the Final Four.

Virginia -- with Dawn Staley and Tammi Reiss and the wacky Burge twins -- beat Vanderbilt early in the day in the East Regional final in Charlottesville to advance to the Cavs' third consecutive Final Four.

And perhaps an entire folk song should be written to commemorate the "Last Stand Against Van," which took place that night in Boulder, Colo. -- something that could be strummed each March by every guitar-picker in the Ozarks, and crooned on the stages of Branson, Mo.

A song about Cheryl, a melody about Melody, a tune about Tina. Burnett's backcourt of Howard and Robbins led Southwest Missouri State over Van Chancellor's Mississippi squad in the Midwest Regional final, eliminating the last SEC team standing that year.

But that's been it. Every other season, the SEC showed up at the Final Four, sometimes in pairs, even. You think, "Nobody can feel sorry for the SEC teams, they always get what they want."

Ah, but they don't. One has -- that one we're not going to talk about.

So you see, even if you are a fan of a team in the Big Sky or the Ivy League or the West Coast Conference, etc., you have something in common with a lot of SEC fans. Your team has not won an NCAA title.

We all know this, and yet it seems as if it can't be right. Like we know Nancy Lopez has won everything except the biggest prize, the U.S. Women's Open. Every year at that event, people recount how many times she came close, some of them so close it's just plain ridiculous.

And it's kind of the same with the SEC, and -- let's face it -- especially with Georgia, which has been to the Final Four five times and not won a championship.

A certain coach of a team we're not going to talk about was in Kansas City a few years ago and was asked if she might feel the tiniest bit sorry for the other SEC coaches, most of whom had been at their schools for almost as many eons as she had but had never won an NCAA title. Especially since a few times it had actually been her team that had kept them away from it.

Well, she alluded as to how ... maybe ... oh, not really. After all, these were proud, proud people who were very good in their professions. They didn't need or want her sympathy.

True, but if you saw Andy Landers in the media room in Charlotte in 1996, flanked by the sobbing Saudia Roundtree and La'Keshia Frett ... or the look on Joe Ciampi's face when you ask about 1988, '89 and '90 ... or Rick Moody trying to explain the freakish way that Niesa Johnson happened to split her hand open at halftime in 1994 in Richmond ... and, please, even though the Houston Comets have won three WNBA titles, don't use the words "regional final" around Chancellor.

Now this season, we already know if there's an SEC team to feel sorry for, it's Mississippi State. Which looked like it had its first league tournament title wrapped up before some other team came back and won its 10th. And which won't get to be a host in the NCAA Tournament because some dang pre-booked convention took up every hotel room in the Golden Triangle.

But Sharon Fanning wouldn't want any tissue used up for her, either. Nor would LSU's Sue Gunter, nor would Vandy's Jim Foster. They would tell you it's not about them, anyway, it's about the kids -- and every year, the kids believe they can do it.

Landers was asked once if he ever got tired of chasing the NCAA title, especially after coming so close.

"No," he said, "it just makes me more determined to do it."

He speaks for the SEC coaches (except that one) and every other coach and every player and every fan who is still hoping -- or ever will hope -- to finally win it all.