The march of March

Epiphanies come in odd packages sometimes. Mine came in my car.

Mine came in my car, in a left-turn lane on U.S. 24, seven years ago (I think) this month. I sat in that left-turn lane for a long time, on that Saturday afternoon. The stoplight cycled  three, four, five times before I finally got turned and drove on down to Huntington North High School, where I could barely find a parking spot.

The occasion was a couple of semistate basketball games, 18 (I think) years after the IHSAA put a shiv in what we used to call Hoosier Hysteria.

The gym was fire-marshals-looking-the-other-way packed.

The atmosphere was full of body heat and exposed nerve endings and a claustrophobic electricity that felt as old as laces on a basketball, and as fresh as tomorrow.

And that's when it dawned on me.

That's when this old sportswriter realized you can kill "Hoosier Hysteria," but you can't kill March in Indiana. Its fundamentals are eternal, no matter how many ways you slice them. One class or four, it's all of a piece, and it's been that way since John Wooden played at Martinsville and Dave Dejernett broke the state title color line at Washington, and since Plump and Oscar and Mount and McGinnis and Damon and on and on and on.

 I was there for the last gasp of Hoosier Hysteria, a term I'll always reserve for the old single-class tournament. It was 25 years ago in the old RCA Dome, and LaPorte and Delta and Bloomington North and Kokomo were the final Final Four. The favorite, Bloomington North, beat Delta 75-54 in the title game to finish 28-1 and win the last single-class title. A North player named Adam Hawley scored the last single-class bucket.

When IHSAA commissioner Robert Gardner presented the winner's trophy that night, the crowd booed him. He was, after all, Hoosier Hysteria's executioner.

And now a quarter century has flown by, and it's sectional week again, and the 1997 state finals seem so ... old timey. As if that night were rendered in sepia tones, and people came to the RCA Dome by horse and buggy, and don't forget to leave a note for the milkman.

Hell. Even the RCA Dome itself is long gone.

Which is to say, March marches on, and if what it means in Indiana never changes, everything else does. Going back to one class today would be like trading in your  Apple Music app for a Victrola. The demographics of school systems have changed that radically since 1997, and even more so since 1954, when Milan beat Muncie Central and launched a mythology that would animate the supporters of Hoosier Hysteria for the next 43 years.

Then, Muncie Central was the "big school," with just over 2,000 students. Today, the biggest school in Indiana is Carmel, which has 5,400 students in four grades and looks more like a small-college campus than a high school.

Now imagine a school that size or close to it playing, say, Shakamak (enrollment 334) in the first round of the sectional. It would be beyond farcical.

Look. No one was more opposed than I was in 1997 to breaking Hoosier Hysteria into four pieces. I had a whole pile of carefully reasoned arguments against it: Tradition, the fact it was still by far the most successful high school basketball tournament in America ... tradition. Why fix what wasn't broken?

What I missed was that if it wasn't broken, it soon would be. Attendance was already dwindling in dribs and drabs. The big schools were getting bigger and the small schools were still small. And the most important thing I missed?

That the love match between Hoosiers and high school basketball wasn't going to change no matter what happened. 

Crowds might be smaller, the infrastructure more diffuse, but certain truths would remain truths. Communities would still hang their hopes on the slender shoulders of teenagers. They would still scrawl SEMISTATE BOUND or GOOD LUCK (INSERT NICKNAME HERE) on their car windows. They would celebrate with their boys or girls as they cut down the nets, or swear the refs got paid under the table if they lost.

All of that is happening again this week. And all of that has been happening in this state for 111 years now.

I could be wrong, of course. But I think it's here to stay.