Thanks to CBS, the NCAA and all the student athletes who are going to go pro in something other than sports, there's still almost two hours before tipoff of the national championship game. That gives me time to make my belated prediction, for what that's worth (at least I got one team in the final, although my predicted champ, Georgetown, is gone).

Florida 60, Ohio State 52.

A friend and very close Buckeye observer (still in mourning over the BCS championship game) enacted a couple of scenarios under which Ohio State could win. 1) Mike Conley Jr. could present the one and only matchup that would give Florida fits. 2) Greg Oden, instead of getting in foul trouble himself, gets someone on the Gators' front line in foul trouble. Both plausible. It was amazing to see how much devastation Conley wrought against Georgetown in the semifinal, but it wasn't surprising, because, again, of the Hoyas' many strengths, point guard was not one of them. In fact, how many schools in the country have point guards as good as Conley, especially freshmen?

There was one more: 3) Florida is way overdue for a bad game, unlike Ohio State, which got both of theirs out of their system against Xavier and Florida.

Also plausible, but unlikely. So Atlanta will be in an uproar tonight, because eight out of every 10 people I came across today, in two of the big downtown hotels and in the street, were Gators fans. Short drive. The souvenir stands were stocking up on Florida gear and they were still running out fast.

The buzz in the streets since Saturday, by the way, has been strong. It's good that this city is in the Final Four rotation - it's a football town, but a college town more than that, so everybody's into it. There also were about a jillion free concerts in Centennial Park over the weekend, including Ludacris on Sunday, when it was raining most of the day but him and the crowd was still booming all through the area, meaning that you didn't actually have to fight the crowds to hear him.

Imagine that in Baltimore, except in earlier rounds, because, of course, they'd never hold a Final Four in a regular basketball arena, as it was pointed out to me several times since my plea for a new arena two Sundays ago. Of course, as others have pointed out to me before, if the city had put a roof on the stadium in which the Ravens now play, some event of that magnitude might already have come here. Too late to worry about that, though.

Anyway, none of us media hacks are picking Ohio State, either. USA Today ran the predictions of its staffers this morning, and all but one picked Florida.

Minutes ago, we had the first notable instance of media covering media. A credentialed photographer just climbed atop a chair and took a picture of the media work room on the dome floor. Just what the public has on its mind on the final night of March Madness: how many writers showed up. Can't wait to go out, get a copy of that paper and frame that photo.

OK ... still an hour and a half until tipoff. Time for me to figure out exactly why Roy Williams got into the Hall of Fame so fast - as did Jim Boeheim - while Gary Williams has never even been a finalist.

And: what the Sun's new owners will do first - cut the sports department's travel budget, or give Carlos Zambrano an eight-figure contract extension.