An ocean, a five-hour time difference and the Florida Gators were all that stood between Allison Taylor and March Madness glory.

Unfortunately, it just wasn’t to be.

The dream came crashing down when the Gators knocked off the Ohio State Buckeyes Monday in the NCAA basketball championship. Taylor, like thousands of KU students, had entered her bracket into Facebook’s second annual bracket contest. Unlike many of those students, though, Taylor was doing her best to keep up with the tournament while she studied abroad in Paris.

“Before I came on study abroad, I had only missed a handful of home games in the past three seasons,” Taylor, a Topeka sophomore, said. “I’m usually a diehard March Madness fan and watch every game possible, but this year it has been difficult to keep track of how all the teams have been playing.”

Taylor said she tried to keep up with the bracket contest by visiting a sports bar she found in Paris that showed a few games.

In the contest, users filled out brackets and were awarded points based on the success of their selections. The owner of the top bracket won $25,000. The rest were just for bragging rights among individual networks.

Going into Monday’s championship, Taylor was in second place among the KU network.

“I usually keep up with college basketball pretty well, so I felt like I knew some of the frontrunners for the Final Four,” Taylor said. “But I didn’t think my bracket would do this well because usually there are more Cinderellas, and I didn’t pick many upsets.”

Patrick Johnson had no reservations picking Florida to win it all. He never considered going with the hometown Jayhawks; in fact, he missed by picking them to lose to Southern Illinois in the Sweet 16, and instead settled on the Gators to take the title. Why did he do it?

Johnson, a graduate student in Applied Behavioral Science, graduated from the University of Florida less than a year ago.

“I was the recipient of a lot of trash talk from those loyal to KU, especially when Kansas defeated Florida in overtime on a neutral court by 2 points in preseason play,” Johnson said. “Luckily, our department in particular has a number of students and faculty with degrees from UF. In other words, I had a substantial support group.”

Johnson’s bracket was ranked among the best at KU going into the championship game. Even though Johnson correctly picked the Gators’ title game victory, he finished with 165 points, five short of the winning total.

Dave Rombeck, 2005 graduate, was the lone person in the KU network to finish ahead of Johnson. Rombeck pulled away from the majority of Kansas fans when he picked the Jayhawks’ Elite Eight loss to the UCLA Bruins and finished with 170 points.

Kansan staff writer Erick R. Schmidt can be contacted at eschmidt@kansan.com.

— Edited by Mark Vierthaler