The hoops come home

"I'll make it."

-- Jimmy Chitwood

And he did, of course. It's what we do in Indiana.

Jimmy Chitwood makes the shot and Larry Bird makes the steal and dish that takes down the Pistons (who themselves are from Indiana), and Oscar Robertson comes to Milwaukee to help Kareem win his first NBA title. Steve Alford shoots Indiana University to a national title. Damon Bailey puts 40,000 people in the Hoosier Dome for a high school basketball game, and, over in Lebanon, a shoot-the-lights-out kid named Rick Mount is the  first high school athlete ever to grace the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Basketball is what we do here. Better'n anybody, more legendarily than anybody, more cinematically than anybody.

Once upon a time the citizens of a burg named Onward over in Cass County squared off against the state police to keep their high school open, because it was being merged into nearby Walton. That was about basketball, because Onward and Walton were fierce rivals, and there was no way the folks in Onward were going to send THEIR kids to school with THOSE sons-of-biscuits. 

Besides, Walton always bought the refs over there. Why, everyone in Onward knew it.

And everyone in America knows this: If you're gonna put the NCAA Tournament in a bubble, that bubble might as well be in Indiana.

And so Da Basketball Tournament comes to Da Basketball State, and listen, it's no big thing. Indiana has played host to the Final Four so many times -- even the women's Final Four -- it can do it in its sleep. It's played host to the largest single-day sporting event in the world (the Indianapolis 500) for the last 110 years. Think it can't handle the entire NCAA Tournament one time?

Of course it can. 

Come March, then, they'll play every game of the Madness in Indiana, at Lucas Oil and Banker's Life and Hinkle and the Fairgrounds, and also Assembly Hall and Mackey Arena. And here in the Fort, we'll get the entire NCAA Division III show.

Basketball is what we do here. Ever since Naismith put up the peach baskets and, not very long after, Crawfordsville won the first state high school tournament.

Homer Stonebraker and Wingate came along after that, and then Franklin's Wonder Five and John Wooden and Dave Dejernette and Jumpin' Johnny Wilson and on and on. Bill Garrett led Shelbyville to a state title and then broke the color line at IU. Dejernette and Willie Gardner and Oscar and Hallie Bryant and a bunch of others did the same, essentially, for the high schools. And then came Judi Warren and LaTonya Pollard and the girls.

And one night at one of the Indy Final Fours some years back, sitting at a table with a bunch of the national sportswriters who were there to cover the event, talk got around to what everyone thought of Indianapolis as a Final Four venue. Eventually Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe weighed in.

"I love Indianapolis," he said. "They could hold the Final Four here every year as far as I'm concerned."

Or the whole blamed tournament?

Sure. Why not?