During some free time on Tuesday, I sent an email to some friends containing the words “Justin Harper, Forward, Richmond.” In response, exactly no one wrote “Unsubscribe,” or “Who is that?” or “Dude, why are you emailing me the name of inside/outside scoring threats from the Atlantic 10 Conference?”

No, me and everyone else just got a similarly terse email a few minutes later, from another friend, announcing that Isaiah Thomas, the point guard at the University of Washington, was off the board. We were all business, with the admitted exception of the fact that we were all interrupting our respective business days for these emails.

There were three more rounds of our DIY NCAA player fantasy draft yet to finish, and the first full day of March Madness was coming up fast.

We are all grown men: some of us fathers, some with post-graduate degrees, all of us comparatively well-adjusted, some of us smart enough to know that Richmond’s first-round matchup against Vanderbilt looks like a reasonable upset pick. Why were we doing this? Well, the simplest answer is that we are hideous, hideous basketball dorks who happen also to share a taste for fantasy basketball. (Ladies!)

But the more specific answer is that we were having a NCAA fantasy draft because we could. Licensing issues prevent fantasy sports giants from hosting player-driven NCAA drafts along the lines of the average NBA fantasy basketball league, and those sites do plenty well with their bracket-prediction fantasy games. Last year, 4 million people picked a bracket through ESPN.com’s Tournament Challenge, which features some nifty coding, a $10,000 prize for a perfect bracket, and a State Farm sponsorship. In contrast, there are eight of us in the hand-collated NCAA fantasy league run by Brendan Flynn, a doctoral candidate in political science at the City University of New York’s grad center. We’re still working out the corporate sponsorship thing.

We’re almost certainly not alone in taking the DIY route during the NCAAs, although it’s hard to know just how many more of us there are out there. Picking a good team isn’t easy. Finding players with the same full-spectrum statistical performance that works in a NBA fantasy league is still the goal, but players (literally) stop producing once their team is eliminated, which makes each pick simultaneously an exercise in game-forecasting and player-centric prediction. (We hold a second draft after the Sweet 16 to fill in all those zombie roster spots.)

A requirement that each team feature two players from mid-major teams — players similar to, although clearly not nearly as valuable as, the aforementioned Justin Harper — ensures that team owners don’t just stack their team with big-name, big-program players. And with all 10 players on each roster figuring in the scoring, attention to detail — or at least a willingness to stay up late on random January nights to scout unheralded players from Utah State or Gonzaga — is often rewarded.

But while winning an NCAA Tournament fantasy league isn’t easy — especially with Harper off the board — building one is not as difficult as it sounds. Because the NCAA Tournament is fairly brief and the field is comparatively limited — 68 teams this year, with fewer and fewer teams in every round — the amount of information to process isn’t totally overwhelming.

And while those who can write their own fantasy basketball programs should feel free to do so — and are welcome to join our league next year — all it really takes is a commish with a modicum of Microsoft Excel skill, the desire required to comb through box scores, a certain masochistic streak and a commitment to watching as much college basketball as possible. “I don’t really need a reason to watch West Coast Conference games late at night,” Flynn said. “But I have one now.” Even in instant-message form, you could almost hear Flynn sigh at what he had just written. “This sounds really cool, huh?”

That depends on your perspective, of course. But for those of us — to reiterate: hideous, hideous basketball dorks — for whom such a thing does sound cool, a DIY fantasy league is just another way to make college hoops’ most exciting fortnight that much more awesome.

Over the course of a whole season — in complicated fantasy leagues that feature waiver wires, a multiplicity of scoring categories and lineups that are adjustable from one day to the next — it obviously helps to have access to ESPN’s army of programmers and acres of buzzing servers. But for college basketball’s two wildest and most wonderful weeks, you just need a Brendan Flynn of your own and an abiding, geeky love of the game.

It would probably help to have Justin Harper’s scoring and rebounding, too, but he’s already taken.

Photo: AP/Mel Evans