Weekend Roundup: Albany Loses, Sightings, and Boston

You made UConn sweat. You had Huskie fans wondering whether the nightmare of being the first number one seed to lose to a 16 seed might actually come true. A late run by the Huskies prevented the Great Danes from being the first 16 seed to win a game and become the most storied Cindarella team in the history of the tournament, but it was great to hear that the team did so well.

I wasn't able to watch the game because I was having my anniversary dinner at a very nice Cambridge restaurant, where I happened to sit next to Roberto Martinez, who's an up and coming physicist at Harvard and who happens to be starring on Animal Planet in a show called Chasing Nature.

But now Martinez, 26, is about to bring it down to a level the average American can understand and even enjoy.

Martinez is about to become a reality TV star.

''They've got the tools. They've got the brains. And they've only got five days to replicate the wonders of the natural world," shouts a recent Animal Planet ad for the new show, called ''Chasing Nature."

It is, in a sense, ''Survivor" for really, really smart people, and when Martinez heard about it almost a year ago, he jumped at the idea of appearing on the show.

He may be smart, but he's also young and hip with a face made for television.

He may be a scientist, but he's also a disc jockey, a guy who plays his own house music in Boston-area clubs, then comes home to curl up with a nice, long article on, say, constructive quantum field theory.

It was only after getting back to our hotel room that we found out what had transpired with the Albany-UConn game (and realized just who had sat down next to us at dinner). Pretty incredible stuff.

Oh, and the dinner was quite good, but we had an even better dinner the next night at an Italian restaurant, Piattini on Newbury St. The food there was exquisite and they had a very impressive wine list by the glass, which gives you tremendous flexibility on pairing your wine with the food, which itself presents many choices. Piattini applies the tapas concept to Italian food, which means you can try mini portions of many of the dishes on the menu.

It's definitely worth another visit. And Albany has much to look forward to next year as well.