Home at last

That one year, I flew out to Sioux Falls for the Summit League basketball tournament, on account of IPFW had a real shot at winning and reaching Basketball God's Country, aka the NCAA Tournament.

(The Mastodons didn't. Came close. Lost by three in the title game to North Dakota State when a kid named Taylor Braun went all hero ball on them in the last three minutes.)

Anyway ... Sioux Falls wasn't the edge of forever, but it felt like it. Ten minutes or so west of the city the countryside opened up and it was Great Plains Central. The Badlands were out there somewhere. Mt. Rushmore. North Dakota was to the north; Nebraska and Oklahoma were to the south, Colorado and the Rockies to the west.

In other words: It did not feel like home.

Home is where what is now Purdue Fort Wayne -- forget the blue-and-white; you'll get black-and-old-gold now and like it -- will be going next July.

Home is the Horizon League, an address that's been making all kinds of sense for at least five years and finally will be PFW's address. School and conference officials announced the move yesterday, to an unspoken chorus of "It's about time." The Horizon League, after all, is Cleveland State and Detroit Mercy and Wright State and Illinois-Chicago, IUPUI and Northern Kentucky and Oakland (Mich.). It's a Midwest league. It's what the Summit League used to be -- much of the Horizon League are Summit League alums -- before it packed up and moved west.

The Summit League is now the Dakotas and Colorado and Oklahoma and Nebraska. It's a Great Plains league. It's a football league, particularly if you're North Dakota State and South Dakota State, a couple of perennial FCS powers. It's no place for a non-football-playing regional campus stuck out there on an island a six-hour bus ride east of the next easternmost Summit League school (Western Illinois).

I don't know how the travel budget alone didn't take down the whole IPFW/PFW athletic department, these past few years. So from that standpoint alone, moving back in with its Midwest pals will be an immediate boon to the operating ledger.

Otherwise, culturally and geographically, the Horizon is home. There are four other regional schools in the league. It does not play football, and its headquarters is in Indianapolis. Old rivalries with IUPUI, Oakland, Northern Kentucky will be renewed, and there won't be any more road trips to the edge of forever.

Detroit and Chicago are three hours away. Dayton, home of Wright State, is two-and-a-half. Cleveland's three-and-a-half. Indy's two. So no more Oregon Trail and wagons ho.

And now I find myself thinking about Southern Utah University, and how oddly the worm turns sometimes.

Southern Utah, once upon a time, was in the Summit League. It's located in Cedar City, Utah, and back in the day it was Purdue-Fort Wayne's doppelganger.

Just as PFW is now too far east for the Summit League's footprint, Southern Utah was too far west. Like PFW, it didn't fit. Like PFW, it was the outlier, the square peg, the one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other. So in 2012, the Thunderbirds left to join the Big Sky.

But now?

Now, Southern Utah would fit right in with the Summit League; it even plays football. And it's Purdue-Fort Wayne who no longer fits in.

Your geography lesson for today, or something.