By George! They're NCAA's GMU Fans now!

NCAA's Cinderella team, the George Mason Patriots, are everyone's favorite team to win it all from the NCAA Final Four.

Of course, watching them upset one team after another to reach the NCAA Final Four sure helps.

Nobody even knew that there's a team playing basketball in George Mason. All of a sudden, people are wearing the Patriots green and gold and rehearsing the hitherto for unknown names of the team's starting line-up around water coolers.

This just proves that the nation is just discovering George Mason and that's perfectly okay.

The whole nation, and even the world, is suddenly aware of Northern Virginia's own George Mason University, by virtue of the incredible feat by its men's basketball team to make it to the elite ''Final Four'' of NCAA competition this weekend.

The team's amazing upset of four consecutive foes in the post-season tournament, including three highly-touted programs with long histories of top-drawer athletic achievements, truly constitutes a ''Cinderella story'' guaranteed to become legend among all sports enthusiasts for generations.

Everybody is browsing through their personal histories, looking for that one day when they went to George Mason to take a night class, attended a seminar or, for some, that diploma that proves they earned a degree from the school.

The NCAA tournament justifies the existence of some schools in North America and George Mason is a classic example.

Too bad it takes an achievement in sports to earn a school recognition that it deserved all along for its academics and other offerings, but has been denied. But we're sure the folks at GMU will take it. We've all become ''GMU Conscious'' now, even as we scramble now to get our hands on season tickets for the next basketball year.

NCAA's Cinderella team, George Mason has 15/4 odds to win their NCAA Final Four match-up at Bodog. Can these George Mason Patriots come out of the NCAA Final Four as champions? Log on and check out Bodog now.