Afternoon in a small town

 Norwell High School won its first Indiana girls basketball title last night in Indianapolis, and when I heard that the years spun away like October leaves. Oh, not because it was Norwell, mind you, although the title came 48 years after a fierce little guard named Teri Rosinski took the Knights to the state finals for the first time. 

It was another milestone that did it for me.

Norwell's victory, see, happened on the day the IHSAA celebrated the girls tournament's 50th year. They brought out a bunch of former Miss Basketballs -- the 2012 winner, Norwell's own Jessica Rupright, was among them -- and everyone turned the clock back half a century to the first girls tourney, when little Judi Warren and the Warsaw Tigers beat Bloomfield in the title game to win it all.

Took me right back, all of that did. Took me back not to Norwell and its dateline of Ossian, but to another small town and another late-winter day.

The town was Lapel, In., 85 or so miles south of Norwell High School, a bedroom community for Indy now but a quiet little farm burg then. The year was 1977, and I'd been a sportswriter for the late, great Anderson Daily Bulletin for about two months at the time. And one particular afternoon I made the short jaunt to Lapel High's gym to cover a girls sectional game.

We were three weeks away from Teri Rosinski and the Knights' big day, and two years into the girls joining Hoosier Hysteria. You couldn't see what was coming, way back then. You couldn't see the steady tramp of years that would give us Pat Summitt and her mighty Tennessee Volunteers, or Geno Auriemma and his even mightier UConn Huskies, or Caitlin Clark playing to sellout crowds wherever she went in a women's professional league everyone seemed to want to watch.

None of it was even a whisper in the wind, that afternoon in Lapel.

Instead it was a bunch of girls dribbling up the floor with their eyes glued to a boys' ball too big for their hands, as if it were a boisterous puppy that might jump its leash at any moment. It was a thousand jump balls and ten thousand fouls. It was Indiana's game, but only if you squinted hard and tilted your head just so.

Fifty years along I tell people about that afternoon in a small town, and say they can't conceive how far the girls have come, and how high has been their ascent. This morning I read about Norwell's ferociously disciplined 1-3-1 halfcourt trap that squeezed the life out of unbeaten Greensburg, yielding 19 turnovers and a 19-4 advantage in points off turnovers, and I try to see it happening that day in Lapel. I literally cannot.

Those days are as alien to these as a Victrola is to an MP3.  And that is  the best tribute I can imagine to the persistence and drive of all the girls and all the coaches between then and now, girls and coaches who loved the game as much as any boy and who saw, even if we couldn't, how skillfully they could learn to play it.

This afternoon, as usual, there will be a bunch of women's college games on the tube. I suggest you watch one, and think about the road that led to it. Or just think about those Norwell Knights, who are most assuredly not their mothers' Norwell Knights.

"The way our girls have learned to play this 1-3-1, this is the best we've ever played it with this group," Norwell coach Eric Thornton told Dylan Sinn of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette when it was done last night. "It's not just that we play a 1-3-1, it's the way we play it. That's these girls ..."

These girls. These girls, who have come so very, very far.