In any big sports event, there’s always a pound of hype, analysis, trash talk and odds-making for every ounce of actual play. I’m thinking particularly of Monday’s NCAA Basketball Championship Game that crowned the University of North Carolina Tarheels and brought an end to the Final Four and March (April) Madness. The game itself didn’t live up to the build-up. But then, nothing short of a triple-overtime squeaker with Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan bounding out of the stands for a tie-breaking game of H*O*R*S*E would have paid off the anticipation.

Championship games are often disappointments, and the game between the Spartans and the Tar Heels was over almost as soon as it began. There had been lots of talk about what Michigan State had to do to beat UNC, but it sure didn’t happen. There’s something heartless about the ability of sports to crush hope and give the victory to the superior team despite the character, grit and determination of the underdog.

There hasn’t been quite as much hype about it, but the stock market is steaming into the heart of its quarterly earnings season. After a nice rally like the one we’ve been enjoying on U.S. exchanges, the approach of quarterlies sends shivers of fear down the spines of investors. It’s that reality check thing again. Stocks can rise on hope, but a bad earnings report can do a Hindenburg on an individual stock and a spate of disappointing results can crush the market’s momentum like a grape.

If you own a stock that misses on earnings, you have a dilemma. You can always put in a tight stop, leaving enough wiggle room so you don’t get stopped out of a stock that then takes off. But when the news is bad, your little stop will often be swamped in the flood of selling, resulting in a much bigger loss.

So keep your stop-losses in place and watch the news closely when your companies’ stocks are due to report. If you’re not sure when that report is scheduled, you can find it at finance.yahoo.com. Go to the main page for your stock and click on the “Analyst Estimates” heading on the left side of the page. If your company has announced the date for its earnings report, it will show up there.

Good luck. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.