Like many Americans, I spent a wintery weekend sitting on my duff watching March Madness basketball. Did you?

If you did, you endured boring episodes from the TV yakkers who spent lots of time telling us why this team or that conference was skilled and strong, and how they would advance to the next round.

They were interesting – sort of –  but we all knew they were filling air time between the commercials. Experts or not, they were just the preliminary act. With the tip-offs, the real show began. And, no matter if a team was from a major conference or a tiny school from nowhere, they all played with one ball.

Basketball is a simple game. In the words of my all-time favorite commentator, Tony Hinkle, the late legendary Butler coach, the team that puts the ball in the basket the most times wins.

Being a Hoosier (yes, I am from away. But I married well), basketball is a sort of religion. My father would drag me to games while telling me, over and over, how, in 1929, his hometown high school, the Washington “Hatchets,” won the state championship.

Until 1997, all Indiana high schools played together in one class, allowing for Cinderella stories where the little rural guys knocked off the big urban teams. In 1953, tiny Milan High won on a last-second shot, providing the blueprint for my favorite basketball movie, “Hoosiers.”

Over the weekend, the NCAA men's teams put on a show as Purdue, featuring a giant center (Zack Edey, 7’4” and 300 pounds), showed how you can play at a high level with two or three players draped over his frame.

But for my money, the best show was put on by the women's teams, as Indiana University, led by 6’3” Mackenzie Holmes from Gorham, put on an all-star defensive show as she blocked shots and grabbed rebounds. Her efforts helped IU steamroll Fairfield.

Of course, there was Iowa, and the Caitlin Clark show. If you are alive and follow sports, you know she is a generational player, like Oscar Robertson. Despite getting hammered in the face, she displayed an exciting array of skills, especially her passing. For the record, she scored 27 points, had 10 assists, eight rebounds and a trio of steals.

The women's games are the latest edition of how sports showcase women as tough competitors who can get up when knocked to the floor. They can be brave and tough when needed.

But, if you are an old dog like me and enjoyed being married to a strong Maine woman for 54 years, you know that already.

Recently, I read about women who displayed toughness and bravery in World War II. It is a biography my favorite daughter-in-law sent me: “A Woman of No Importance, The untold story of the American spy who helped win World War II.”

It chronicles the life of Virginia Hall. She was an American woman who spent much of the war in occupied France leading and coordinating the resistance fighters against Nazi occupiers by establishing the spy networks that provided the Americans and English with vital information.

The Nazi Gestapo so feared her they put a price on her head. She was forced to escape by hiking over the Pyrenees mountains into Spain, in the winter.

Oh, I forgot to mention she had a prosthetic leg.

Then, after a time, she was sent back to France to use her contacts and trusted friendships to attack German forces behind the lines as the Allied armies rolled into France. She was the only civilian awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation's second-highest military honor. But she was not alone.

In our neighborhood, Damariscotta was the retirement home of the late Cordelia Dodson Hood, a veteran of the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA.

Her language skills and nerve prompted her OSS bosses to order her to fly into occupied France and make her way into Switzerland. There she became a key member of part of a secret mission designed to obtain the diaries of Mussolini's son-in-law to be used as evidence in the war crimes trials that resulted in the execution of top Nazi leaders.

If you, especially the fathers of daughters, are interested in the careers of these and other daring women, you can ask your library to order a book named "Sisterhood of Spies, The Women of the OSS.”

Women's sports allow our daughters a chance to observe positive role models. So do the wartime exploits of brave and daring women like Virginia Hall and Cordelia Dodson Hood.

Under all the makeup and fashionable glad rags, women can be, and are, strong, tough and brave.

But then, old dogs like me already knew that.