Hoosier heartbeat

Spring arrived this week on a wind like a fistful of razor blades, leavened only by a sun that reaches higher in the sky every day. This is the third week of March in Indiana, when the warmth of summer is mostly a tease, and winter is the houseguest who's snoring away on the couch, refusing to leave the premises.

But it was a glorious week down in Wabash.

It was a glorious week because the Southwood Knights are headed to the state basketball finals for the first time in school history, and in Indiana that still means what it always has. Hoosier Hysteria -- the exclusive name of the old single-class tournament, at least in the Blob's universe -- may be two decades in its grave, but high school basketball remains a bone-deep thing in Indiana, divided four ways or not. And just as it was the small towns that were the blood root of the old Hysteria, it is the small towns that continue to be the blood root of its partitioned offspring.

And that's why the dead past is right where it belongs. There, I said it.

I say it as someone who banged the drum as loudly as anyone for the old single-class system, arguing in print and otherwise that killing it would be fixing the unbroken. It was a good argument back in 1997. It's a lousy argument in 2018, even though some still try to make it.

And why is it a lousy argument?

Southwood is why.

What's happened there, see, is the very essence of what the diehards claim to miss most about the old days: The ability for some small school never before touched by basketball glory to bathe in it for a solid week. Those kids from Southwood telling the TV stations from Fort Wayne how everyone's been stopping them on the street and congratulating them? Those glowing faces marveling at how the entire community has rallied behind them?

Go back 20 or 30 or 50 years, and those kids were from Argos or Cloverdale or any other small school that made it to state back in the day. The thrill of the big city media coming to their school, the backslaps and go-get-ems from people on the street, even the words the kids spoke into those unfamiliar TV cameras: It's all the same.

And it would never have happened had the Hysteria not died a natural death in 1997. No matter how unnatural it seemed to most of us then.

Without the splitting of basketball in Indiana into four classes, what's happening at Southwood this week -- this deepest expression of our cherished Hoosier heirloom -- would have been impossible. Consolidation and a steady population shift to the cities have made the big schools too big and the small schools too small to realistically compete on the same stage. The demographics just don't work anymore.

It may be pleasant to cling to that old Milan mythology, but mythology is mainly what it is. Milan in 1954 was never the David it's been made out to be, and Muncie Central was never the Goliath. Milan had reached the state finals the year before, after all, and had everyone back from that team. And Muncie Central, like almost all the "big schools" in that day, comprised a touch over 2,000 students.

Today, the biggest schools in Indiana have enrollments running anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 students, and look more like college campuses than high schools. And the small schools are still small.

And never would have had a shot at having the week they've been having at Southwood.

Reveling. Marveling. Preserving the best of a heritage that didn't die with the Hysteria, but was merely reborn.

Update: Was not to be for Southwood. Morristown routed the Knights 89-60 in the 1A title game.