December is a bad time to count March chickens, but some of you surely must have considered NCAA basketball tournament tickets as Christmas presents.

No tickets are available to the NCAA Final Four, of course. You have a better chance of seeing Meriwether Lewis under the Gateway Arch in March than you do of securing a seat in the sold-out Edward Jones Dome in downtown St. Louis.

Three regional sites also no longer are selling tickets — Chicago; Albuquerque, N.M.; and Austin, Texas. But you can still squeeze into the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, N.Y. … if you’re not interested in watching the Jayhawks, that is. There’s always a first time, but Kansas University never has played an NCAA Tournament game in New York state.

Four first- and second-round sites still have seats available — Indianapolis; Tucson, Ariz.; Nashville, Tenn.; and Charlotte, N.C. Unfortunately, the site closest to Lawrence — the Ford Center in Oklahoma City — hung the SRO sign long ago, as did Boise, Idaho, Cleveland and — would you believe? — Worcester, Mass.

To tell the truth, I’d love to go to Worcester, Mass., home of the University of the Holy Cross, so I could impress the locals by pronouncing the city’s name correctly. I have a niece who married a guy from there and he was polite enough to teach me the subtle inflections. As near as I can write it, the preferred pronunciation is WUHS-tah. But I digress.

Time was when you never knew where the NCAA men’s basketball committee would dispatch the Jayhawks.

Four times, for instance, Kansas was assigned to Dayton, Ohio. No school ever has made more NCAA appearances in Dayton than KU. The Jayhawks spent more time in Dayton than Wilbur and Orville Wright did in their bicycle shop.

Among the other far-flung first NCAA stops for Kansas have been South Bend, Ind.; Atlanta (twice); Louisville, Ky.; Lexington, Ky.; Tempe, Ariz.; Memphis, Tenn.; New Orleans; and Winston-Salem, N.C.

Then the NCAA came up with the pod system, or as Rule 15 states: “Teams will remain in or as close to their areas of natural interest as possible.”

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That would mean Oklahoma City for the Jayhawks, just as it was two years ago when Kansas was sent to the Red Clay Country as part of a West Region’s Arrowhead Pond pod, and advanced to the championship game at the Louisiana Superdome, where the Jayhawks were victims of their own dreadful free-throw shooting (an inexplicable 12-of-30 at the line) and Syracuse freshman Carmelo Anthony.

But what if, for some reason, Kansas was NOT sent to Oklahoma City? What if Oklahoma State and Texas were packaged at Oklahoma’s capital in separate pods? That’s certainly a possibility.

In that scenario, KU might wind up in Indianapolis — the second closest site — where tickets remain. It takes about twice as long to drive to Indy from Lawrence on Interstate 70 as it does to take I-35 to Okie City, depending how long it takes you to run the St. Louis traffic gantlet.

Nashville, I suppose, would be another possibility, but I think it’s safe to forget about Boise, Cleveland, Tucson, Charlotte and WUHS-tah — not that any or all of them, particularly vastly underrated Cleveland, wouldn’t be worth a visit.

The morning line has Kansas winning its first two games, then advancing to either Austin, Syracuse, Chicago or Albuquerque. KU, as you know, plays every other year in UT’s Erwin Center, but the Jayhawks never have suited up in the Carrier Dome (although the KU football team played there in 1980), The Pit at New Mexico University or at Chicago’s Allstate Arena.

Technically, Kansas has played at the Chicago venue. The Jayhawks were there in 1993 when it was known as the Rosemont Horizon, but the arena was totally refurbished — thank goodness — in 1999, and thus qualifies as a new site.

Still, when you shake it all out, you might be better off counting your December chickens, selling them and buying 2005 KU football tickets instead.