The top-seeded Lady Terrapins edged out Nebraska 76-64 on Tuesday, but the real backstory in Maryland is that one of its county networks held stable in the face of a record number of unique visitors to the March Madness site.

During the first and second rounds of the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship, there were 3,318,844 total unique visitors to the March Madness on Demand (MMOD) video player, according to CBSSports.com. That represents a 129% increase over 2007's figures (1,448,546).

The sports site also noted that fans are spending more time browsing the site and its features. Total time spent visiting live streaming video and audio in the first four days of the tournament was 3,705,092 hours, or 222,305,520 minutes. CBSSports said more than 3.6 million fans also are playing in its bracket games, including the largest bracket application on Facebook.

With all that activity and the excitement of an NCAA game in nearby College Park, you might think that a municipal network would break under the strain. Not so in Howard County, where public information officer Kevin Enright reports his network did just fine thanks to monitoring software the county recently installed.

The county, which serves the Baltimore-Washington metro area, deployed a product from eTelemetry that ensures that the network and organization don't suffer as a result of the NCAA tournament.

"This issue is especially timely with the NCAA tourney in full swing and CBS.com streaming all the games live this year, many of which during work hours," Enright said in an e-mail.

Annapolis, Md.-based eTelemetry's products solve video bandwidth issues by intelligently monitoring and filtering workplace Internet use and allocating bandwidth according to who actually needs it.

Now, while the men's team (19-15) lost at Syracuse, 88-72, in the NIT second round after having beaten Minnesota earlier in the week, there are tons of March Madness fans in Howard County just happy that Duke did not advance. The Men's Regional contests start Thursday. I'm waiting to hear back from Enright to see how his network holds up during those weekday contests as well as when the Terps take on Vanderbilt this weekend.

Don't forget to check out the rest of our coverage of the 2008 InformationWeek College Hoops Challenge.