One Shining Moment

"One Shining Moment" is a song written by David Barrett about the NCAA Men's College Basketball Championship. "One Shining Moment" is traditionally played at the end of CBS and TBS's coverage of the championship game of the tournament. The song is played as the winning team's players cut down the nets, to a montage of highlights from the tournament.

Barrett, a singer-songwriter from Michigan, was inspired to write the song in 1986 while watching Larry Bird play on TV at a bar called the Varsity Inn in East Lansing, Michigan, after having played a gig there. He wrote the song down on a napkin the next day, later stating that "the song came fully formed" and "all the lyrics just wrote themselves." He passed the song along to high school friend Armen Keteyian, an investigative journalist for CBS Sports and, at that time, Sports Illustrated, who in turn passed it to CBS Sports Creative Director Doug Towey. However, Towey originally planned to debut the song not after a basketball game, but after a football game, Super Bowl XXI. It was to have been the postgame montage from that contest, but CBS ran past the expected airtime and had a primetime show to debut in the next time slot, so the montage was canceled. CBS then asked Barrett for use of the song after the 1987 NCAA championship game, in which Indiana beat Syracuse. Towey decided to use "One Shining Moment" to close CBS's coverage of the Tournament. The positive public response led to it becoming an annual feature.

Since 2016, TBS broadcasts the championship game biennially; there were concerns that the song would not be used in these years due to its association with CBS. However, on March 16, 2016, CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus confirmed that "One Shining Moment" would still be used during years that Turner Sports broadcasts the championship game under the consortium's contract, owing to the long-standing tradition.

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