Old man shouts at clouds. Film at 11.

 Concordia High School plays Delta in an Indiana boys basketball regional Saturday, and why that landed on my radar this morning I haven't the foggiest.

Oh, wait. I do. 

It landed on my radar because the Cadets will be traveling almost 100 miles to play this "regional." And they'll play it not in any metropolitan hub, or even a big-time venue, but in a 3,000-and-change gym in Lapel.

I am familiar with Lapel. I covered a fair number of basketball and football games there back in my Anderson days, which are sufficiently "back" enough that dinosaurs still strode the earth, and we wrote our award-winning accounts on typewriters or laptops so primitive you couldn't really call them laptops. 

So I know Lapel is not what it was then, which was a humble little farming community. I know it's become part of the creeping Indy metroplex, which might or might not explain why it will host a regional game between two schools that aren't remotely regional.

"Oh, here we go," you're saying now. "Old man shouts at clouds. Film at 11."

I know, I know. I'm being silly, not to say out of touch by about 30 years. I realize class basketball (which I've grown to acknowledge hasn't dampened Indiana's March passion an iota) scrambled the structural landscape of the high school tournament. And I know a lot of that scrambling involved largely abandoning major metro venues, which has diluted the sense of occasion that put a lot of the hysteria in the dear departed Hoosier Hysteria.

But sometimes all of it still strikes me as odd. And I never know when it will.

That it has this week is no reflection on Lapel or its suitability to play host to a regional tournament, understand. I'm sure the good folks there will do a fine job.

But I still want to know why Concordia is playing a regional there instead of, say, New Haven. Or North Side or Northrop or even Bluffton down in Wells County, just to randomly name a handful of area schools.

All of them, see, have larger venues, as do several other area schools not hosting regionals this weekend. New Haven and North both seat 3,300. Bluffton seats 3,231. And Northrop seats 3,500.

I could go on, but you get the point.

And, sure, I get it, schools have to be willing and able to serve as hosts. And so for whatever reason, no one in our area could, or would, or were even contacted.

But Concordia and Delta winding up at Lapel makes me think the IHSAA just sort of randomly picks sites every year. Maybe they close their eyes and throw darts at a map of Indiana, I don't know.

At any rate, there's my geezer not-quite-rant for today. Damn clouds.