At this historic time, with our nation sorely divided over taxes, spending, and party lines, it’s reassuring to witness the splendid uniting rites of March Madness. When it comes to NCAA Basketball Brackets, my fellow countrymen (and women) and co-workers, the State of the Union is strong to very strong, and comfortably at peace. Most of us fill them out, whether or not we can tell a two-three zone defense from a box-and-one.

But is the tradition stale, or at least a little dog-eared? Over the past 30 years, we’ve witnessed the dawn (and set) of Personal Computers, taken cellular ubiquitous, and clutched life-changing Smartphones. We have overcome a cold war, turned braking into better gas mileage, tamed inflation, and reduced urban crime. Yet aside from migrating from photocopiers to online screens in the early 1990s, our beloved Brackets, God Shammgod bless ‘em, have never changed … or even gotten up off the couch.

Defiantly, many of us fill out our Brackets in the same analog dimension as we did back in 1982. Ritual remains as simple as ever: scribble in Winners in the three short days between the Sunday evening selection of the teams and the Thursday of full-on play. Hope you get some upsets right—Tebow willing, three of the Final Four. Annndd, you’re eliminated. Official time of death: sometime during the tournament’s second weekend.

This state of affairs is a collective national embarrassment. Could there be a better way? Of course there could—we’re Americans, and who does Internet innovation, distracting entertainment, and sports better than we do?

Three points:

1. Make it social. It’s time to adopt a new standard: one bracket that you can enter with multiple pools, through the magic of the Internet. Your bracket could be your avatar, at least for the three weeks of March Madness. This is simple and social, and utterly doable.

2. Make the brackets a living thing, like your dog and certain kinds of last testaments. Instead of your dead static brackets, which stick you with your losers after you’ve lost and preclude second chances, your bracket should change as the tournament does. If you picked the games right, terrific. But where you got things wrong, pick yourself up, in defiance of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and have a second act, a third act, and pick again with the teams remaining. Not a new concept, at least on the Internet. Tools to keep you on a diet or a budget already adjust this way.

3. Make it educational. Americans are famously bad at calculating risk. March Madness could be a teaching moment—after all, this tournament is all about higher education, right? Instead of picking winners and losers, pick also your level of confidence. Try a five-point scale. If you’re confident a favorite will prevail, pick that winner with five points of confidence. If you have no idea about an eighth versus ninth seed matchup, guess a winner with just one point of confidence. The game will reward you for you good choices and punish excessive risk-taking and overconfidence.

Do well at this game, and maybe someone will give you a mortgage.

Don’t worry too much about all the math to determine a winner with these social, living, educational brackets. The computer will do that for you. Just enjoy the fact that you can keep playing for the entire tournament, that the conversation with friends, Facebook and real, can last a little bit longer, that you’ll be a little smarter

It’d be different, sure, but un-American? Or totally American?

I think the latter. That’s why I’m doing my part to update the great institution of the brackets, to make March Genius (as I call it) free, not at all scary, and available in beta.

Try it. You just fill in your brackets, same as always. Then you assign a weight to each pick (one ball through five) based on your confidence in the team you’ve chosen. Right or wrong, your score will then be multiplied by your pick’s confidence weight. Sound complicated? No problem, because you can log back in at any time throughout the tournament to change, adjust, and re-pick the games you get wrong.

This is just one small bid to launch a new era and platform for brackets. Innovations will follow innovation, piling up like assists and three-point shots. We may not be able to fix the debt or the Israeli-Palestinian deal. But on this, heck yes, we can.