Matt Freed, Post-Gazette Pitt basketball players, from left, Carl Krauser, Marcus Bowman and Antonio Graves celebrate with teammates at the Petersen Events Center last night as the NCAA tournament seedings are announced. Click photo for larger image.

There were two inventions that really sparked the popularity of the NCAA men's basketball tournament, making it the madness that it is today: television and the office copying machine.

Television gave fans the opportunity to see incredible buzzer-beating moments from games across the country, one after another.

The copying machine enabled fans to vicariously experience the thrill of the competition with the office pool.

Nowadays, however, the electricity that runs through March Madness is coming more and more from the office worker's desktop computer. Thanks to the Internet, machines that once were limited to the mundane tasks of the workday now can be used to track teams, rate players' performances or, if the boss isn't looking, catch game broadcasts. This year, for the first time, CBS Sports is providing free online viewing of tournament games.

You can even fill out your brackets on the computer.

Three of the main Web sites for this evolution in gamesmanship are espn.com, cbssportsline.com and aol.com, the newest player to take the court. Once the Web masters with these companies realized how many people were visiting their sites during tournament time, they quickly found ways to invite them to come inside to play.

"The tournament-related content is definitely the biggest driver," said Paul Melvin, associate manager of communications at EPSN in Brisol, Conn. "We've seen significant growth every year that we've had it."

ESPN, the sports broadcasting giant, has been offering interactive college basketball brackets since it started espn.com in 1995. By 1999, the company was seeing hundreds of thousands of people playing. In 2004, Mr. Melvin said, ESPN had 1.25 million players submitting 2.8 million entries for the men's and women's tournaments combined. Last year, those numbers climbed to 1.5 million players and 3 million entries.

"And we expect to see growth again this year," he said.

Alex Reithmiller, spokesman for CBS SportsLine, said his company has been offering online bracket competitions since 1998, and "it has really blossomed in the past five years."

"The NCAA Tournament is one of the most popular events for us during the year," Mr. Reithmiller said. "It rivals NFL Sundays in terms of traffic. And the brackets are a very popular item on our site."

While CBS SportsLine, based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., doesn't release its traffic numbers, Mr. Reithmiller acknowledged that the trends are increasing.

"But they can't help but increase," he said. "The Internet itself is growing. Every year there are more people online. To me, it's like, of course it's growing."

AOL Sports, based in Dulles, Va., joined the competition when aol.com was launched as a free Web portal last summer. According to Ross Schaufelberger, general manager for AOL Sports, the company had half a million bracket players last year, "and we're expecting much bigger numbers this year."

All three Web sites -- and many others that have sprung to life -- give visitors the chance to predict the winners in each round of the basketball tournament. You can set up your own "office pool" with your own scoring rules and compete against people you know or you can play against everyone else at the Web site for cash prizes. And, because no one has quite figured out how to get online visitors to pay for their amusement, it's usually free. Corporate sponsors such as Pontiac, Mountain Dew, Gillette and Schick foot the bill through advertising.

But corporate sponsors aren't the only ones paying for our college basketball fixations. According to a study by Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., a New York-based outplacement consultant company, the nation's employers will see a marked drop-off in worker productivity during the three weeks of the NCAA Tournament. Estimates are that, for every 13.5 minutes workers spend on the Internet tracking March Madness games, the cost to employers in lost wages alone exceeds $237 million.

"Beginning [today], college basketball fans across the country will begin organizing office pools and researching teams for their brackets. Even people who do not follow college basketball for the entire season can easily get wrapped up in the excitement of March Madness and trying to pick the winners," said company Chief Executive Officer John A. Challenger.

The bite out of productivity can be irritating to a company, but how many office managers really want to be the Ebenezer Scrooges restricting online tournament time as if it were lumps of coal? Isn't a happy employee a more productive employee?

That's the thinking of Ronnie Manning, public relations manager for Websense, a San Diego-based company that helps employers meet workers halfway during tournament time.

Founded in 1994, Websense provides employers with all sorts of Web security, blocking spyware, viruses and unwanted e-mails. The company also can restrict employees' access to various Internet sites ranging from pornography or gambling to streaming media. Sometimes they're filtered, sometimes they're blocked.

"March Madness is just one of those times of the year that could create a productivity drain," Mr. Manning said. "We create a work-life balance. You want to allow your employees to use the Internet for personal stuff -- they want to plan a vacation or check sports scores -- but you don't want them to abuse the policy so that they stay productive throughout the day."

The result is "quota time."

"A company can give employees an hour or an hour and a half of quota time per day, and you can put those on categories such as sports or shopping or travel or finance, however you want to do it," Mr. Manning said. "Then, when I go to espn.com, a screen will pop up saying, 'You have an hour of quota time. Do you want to use a 10-minute increment of that right now?' Then I click on OK. The next time you come back, it tells you you have 50 minutes of quota time remaining.

"It allows an employee to manage personal use of the Internet throughout the day."

Mr. Manning said Websense has 24,000 clients across the country, including several companies in the Pittsburgh area, but the firm keeps the names of those customers private.

He emphasized that it's the companies that decide how much access to grant their computer-bound employees.

"It's all very flexible," he said. "An organization can give as much time as it wants to. All the policies are set up by the organization. We just basically provide the tool."

Unfortunately, Mr. Manning doesn't have that much interest in this year's March Madness. His team, the University of Maryland, didn't make the tournament.