Yes, I was a Gonzaga partisan, in the NCAA final.

I tend to pull for the West Coast team, if one is available, and Gonzaga qualifies because it plays in the Pacific time zone.

Alas, it a ragged, herky-jerky and poorly officiated game (44 fouls!?!) ended at North Carolina 70, Gonzaga 65 — at about 6:30 a.m. in France.

Thus is extended the region’s NCAA basketball title drought to 20 years, along with the widespread perception that West Coast teams can’t close a deal.

It wasn’t always like that.

Pacific time zone teams dominated the NCAA tournament over its first 36 years. And it wasn’t just UCLA — though the Bruins contributed 10 championships during that stretch.

Oregon won in 1939, the first NCAA title; Stanford won it in 1942; the University of San Francisco (well, Bill Russell, anyway) won in 1955 and 1956. Cal was champion in 1959.

The Pacific states clearly had something going on. The region didn’t have all that many four-year schools, but a significant chunk of them won a title or two or 10.

Success came much harder over the next 22 seasons. UNLV won it in 1990 (crushing Duke by 30, for you Dukie-haters); UCLA got its only title since 1975 in 1995 (thanks, O’Bannon brothers and Tyus Edney) and Arizona won it in 1997. (Counting Ariz as a Pacific team; they play in the Pac-12, after all. And kudos to Lute Olsen and Miles Simon.)

But nothing since 1997. Oh-for-21st century.

Why should that be?

We would have to believe the East has more strong leagues and more strong teams.

The West is pretty much limited to the Pac-10/12 for top-level basketball programs. Gonzaga has stepped forward pretty much in the exact time frame of the West Coast drought, but it will always be tougher to win a national title out of a conference (in this case, the West Coast) dominated by one school.

Our definition of West Coast includes the four states on Pacific time, plus Arizona, the whole of which is on Pacific time through the winter.

By that definition, of the 351 NCAA Division I schools … only 36 qualify as “West Coast”.

And the region has only the one strong conference — the Pac-12, and two of its members (Colorado, Utah) are Mountain-time teams. Of the other 10, five have won at least one championship.

Gonzaga is the one annually strong private school in the region. Saint Mary’s of California is decent, these days, but some of the other privates who have been good in days gone by (USF, Seattle, Pepperdine, Pacific) are not good now, and the few California State schools who have been competitive, nationally, once upon a time (Long Beach State, Fresno State) are in lulls.

So, only 36 “West Coast” teams, barely over 10 percent of the national total, and of those 36 only one private (Gonzaga) and maybe five public schools (UCLA, Arizona, Oregon and two other Pac-12 schools) are decent at any time.

Thus, the rest of the country has far more elite-level teams.

What makes the West Coast drought worse is the region’s inability to make winners out of finalists, since 1997.  Arizona (2001), UCLA (2006) and Gonzaga (2017) all went down at the last hurdle.

This one will sting for Gonzaga, which seemed to be ill-used by the officiating crew, which missed an out-of-bounds play that would have given the ball to the Zags when they still trailed by one a point, with 49 seconds to play.

Said Zags coach Mark Few: “That’s just the way it goes.”

For now, when it comes to luck in the NCAA Tournament … the West Coast has none at all.