Folks who market sports books and DVDs believe you won't read or watch unless you are assured that the subject is unequivocally "the greatest"—be it the greatest game, the greatest match, the greatest fight or the greatest season. So in time for the 2009 NCAAbasketball tournament, our nation's greatest sports-and-gambling holiday, the NCAA is offering its own salute to March Madness, subtitled, naturally, "The Greatest Moments of the NCAA Tournament."

That it doesn't quite measure up to that superlative is only a quibble. Given that we are talking about 70 years of tournament basketball in a 75-minute DVD, it probably never could. Not surprisingly, it tends to opt for celebrity and familiarity over great and historic. So, for example, we get to see Dwyane Wade lead Marquette to the Final Four in 2003, but nary a moment of Marquette's sole championship team 30 years earlier (because you kids don't remember Bo Ellis and Butch Lee). And while we watch Isiah Thomas lead Indiana to the title in 1981, we don't get a glimpse of Indiana's 1976 champions, Bobby Knight's masterpiece and the last undefeated men's team in major college hoops.

The tournament's early days—when there was a tourney absent madness, when there were no office pools, when the footage was a grainy black-and-white—get short shrift. Of Bill Russell, the architect of back-to-back championships at the University of San Francisco, not a word, though he would go on to rate as basketball's greatest champion. And there is only passing mention of the extraordinary 1957 title game—North Carolina by one point in triple overtime over Kansas with Wilt Chamberlain. The unrivaled John WoodenUCLA dynasty—10 titles in 12 years beginning in 1964—rates only a tribute to Bill Walton's tour de force (21 for 22 from the floor) in a rout of Memphis in the 1973 final.

Since the DVD focuses on comebacks, buzzer-beaters and Cinderella stories, there must be legal reasons to explain the absence of University of Kansas's stunning 2008 championship. It featured both a historic comeback, KU was nine down to Memphis with just over two minutes remaining, and a buzzer-beater, a three-pointer with two seconds left to send the game into overtime. Also inexplicably missing is Villanova's 1985 upset, 66–64, of Big East rival Georgetown, in which Villanova came as close as any team in championship history to executing the perfect game.

This DVD bestows the "best-ever" label on Duke's 1992 104–103 overtime triumph over Kentucky, which also features the most replayed basketball shot ever—Christian Laettner's buzzer-beater. Still, that game was merely a regional final. And while it propelled Duke to the national title, the ultimate superlative must be reserved for a championship tilt. There are abundant candidates: the aforementioned North Carolina–Kansas triple overtime or Villanova-Georgetown; or 1982, North Carolina over Georgetown (a portent of things to come from a then spindly freshman named Michael Jordan); or a year later, with North Carolina State upsetting Houston's Phi Slama Jama juggernaut at the buzzer.

Then there is my all-time favorite, Loyola of Chicago stunning Cincinnati in overtime. I was both surprised and thrilled that the DVD devoted an entire segment to the oft-ignored '63 classic. That game has always been overshadowed by the '66 championship, when Texas Western, an even more anonymous and hardscrabble team than Loyola, with an all-black starting five, defeated Adolph Rupp's all-white Kentucky team. But it was Loyola vs. Cincinnati that first signaled the great racial changes that were about to sweep the game. When the two teams lined up for the opening tip, there were seven black players on the floor—the first NCAA final where black players dominated the court.