Throwbacks

 Take a good long look at the team wearing black-and-gold today, because they are a snapshot from a different time. Sepia tones would suit them well.

And, no, not because Braden Smith has one of those glorious old-timey beards that suggests his name should be Graber or Yoder or something suitably Amish, or that he time-traveled forward from the halcyon days of 1882.

No, sirree. It's because Braden Smith and his beard are there at all.

Four years after coming to Purdue, see, he's still at Purdue, where a few games back he became the NCAA's all-time assists leader, shoving Bobby Hurley off that particular mountaintop. (A feat for which he should be knighted, by the by). He's still at Purdue, and Fletcher Loyer's still at Purdue, and so is Trey Kaufman-Renn.

They came in together four years ago, and now they're going out together as Matt Painter's latest senior class. No one in the rich history of Purdue basketball have played more games as Boilermakers than their combined 117 it eclipses the previous former record of 116, set just last year by their former teammate, Caleb Furst.

What that tells you about Painter's program is it's a dinosaur, but a damn majestic one. It's a throwback to the days when a recruit came to a school and stuck around and grew into a fully formed adult, which is half of what four years in college is supposed to do for you. s. And the faithful who came and filled the home barn with their sound on game days got to watch that process happen right before their eyes.

In other words, Purdue basketball under Painter -- and before him, Gene Keady -- is a culture, not a bus stop. Which is both wonderfully refreshing and as quaint as milk in glass bottles, delivered to your doorstep at the crack of every dawn.

No more. Milk comes in cartons or plastic these days, and you get it at the local superstore. And NIL money and the unfettered transfer portal have transformed big-boy college sports into a vagabond hellscape in which "student-athletes" endlessly ride the rails in pursuit of a better deal.

Rosters routinely turn over completely, or nearly so, from year to year now. Group of 5 schools become de facto farm teams for the Power 4s. And that mossy old saw about not being to tell the players without a scoreboard has become bedrock truth in places like ... oh, say, Bloomington, In.

Not so two hours to the north and west, where the old ways are largely still the way.

Oh, Painter has lost a player or two to the prevailing zeitgeist -- one of them, Cam Heide, played for the Texas team Purdue slipped past the other night -- and the day may come when even Purdue will not be able to keep the tide from coming in. But for now ...

For now, the old-look Boilermakers are a college buckets heirloom, and today they play 1-seed Arizona for a spot in the Final Four for the second time in three seasons. The Wildcats, who more and more look like your impending national champs, are of course favored, led by Jayden Bradley, Brayden Burries and Koa Peat.

Bradley's a senior. But Burries and Peat are freshmen, and neither is expected to be back in Tucson next season. The NBA beckons.

Smith, Loyer and Kaufman-Renn, meanwhile, will be playing their 118th game for Purdue. They're the most decorated trio of Boilermaker seniors since Troy Lewis, Todd Mitchell and Everette Stephens, the fabled Three Amigos of four decades ago. 

Take a look today. Take a good, long look.

You may never see the like of it again.