This is an opinion column.

It was a busy Saturday morning at Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport, especially at the United Airlines gate, where a crowd gathered for a 6 a.m. flight to Houston.

The college kid in the Miami T-shirt. The young adult in the San Diego State hat. The gentleman from Guntersville and a friend who works at Jacksonville State who’ve made this trip before. Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin. And me.

I didn’t survey every passenger so there may have been others headed to H-Town for the same reason. This was one of the great sporting days of the year. This was Final Four Saturday.

There was only one thing missing from our basketball band of fellow travelers, the one thing that would’ve made a great day even better. A team from the state we call home.

That’s not uncommon. This is the 84th Final Four, which means there have been 336 available berths in the national semifinals since the NCAA Tournament began in 1939. How many of those berths were earned by a team from Alabama?