INDIANAPOLIS – Even now, you forget what they are not. The Little College That Could (And Nearly Did)? The Gonzaga Of The Plains? Jimmy ’N’ Buddy ’N’ Rade ’N’ Them?
No, no and, emphatically, no.
And so again Gordon Hayward hoists the shot and again it hits a smidge too hard and jitters away on a Monday night in April, and four months later we are reminded again that what almost happened in that proud and hurtful moment was no fluke.
The basketball gods did not just pull the Butler Bulldogs out of a hat last March.
They did not just choose that particular moment to flip a coin and decide, on that whim alone, to favor Brad Stevens’ boys with their warmest smile.
We know this because Morgan Burke just said so.
We know because Monday morning he was sitting at a lectern in Conseco Fieldhouse, and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick was, and Indiana AD Fred Glass was, and, yes, Butler AD Barry Collier was. And the fact that this meant implicitly that Butler was sitting at the big people’s table had very little to do with what happened last March.
“Butler?” said Burke, Purdue’s athletic director. “I think Butler’s always been good.”
So, no, even if it looks that way, the Bulldogs’ inclusion in the Crossroads Classic – a basketball doubleheader involving Purdue, Notre Dame, Indiana and Butler scheduled for December 2011 and December 2012 – has very little to do with that magical run to the national championship game.
It will help sell tickets, certainly. It might even be the national hook to it all, considering that at Notre Dame hoops is still something of a niche attraction and at Indiana an iconic program has yet to regain its footing.
But make no mistake: Butler was in on this deal anyway, last year’s march to the Final Four notwithstanding..
“(Butler’s) a great fit,” Burke went on. “Certainly it’s a great program right now. But they’ve had great programs over the years. So I think it’s a natural.”
Of course it is. Isn’t that what Stevens and his boys were saying all along, back in April? That they weren’t the cute little underdog that landed in the Final Four because the gods fell in love with them? That they were there because they had the players and the tradition and they did things the right way, and had done so for a long time?
So of course they belong up there with Indiana and Purdue and Notre Dame, because they have before. This Crossroads Classic, see, goes back decades, to the old Hoosier Classic, a holiday doubleheader involving the same four schools and whose driving force in a lot of ways was Tony Hinkle, the longtime Butler coaching legend whose name now graces one of the great basketball arenas in the nation.
Burke said Monday the idea of reviving it came up about the time Swarbrick became Notre Dame’s AD and Glass assumed the reins at IU. In fact, he and Collier had kicked it around before that. So this is not about cashing in on April, anymore than, for Butler, April was about assuming a place among the nation’s elite.
In Butler’s mind, it was already elite. And the Crossroads Classic, therefore, is not about three heavyweights and the hot new flavor of the month.
It’s about four basketball traditions worthy each in their own way, and whose appeal should be (and occasionally is) national.
“I think there’s been great basketball played over the years by all four of these schools,” Collier said Monday, as over his shoulder, appropriately, a Tony Hinkle quote sprawled across a Conseco Fieldhouse wall. “You could look back and point to a number of things (at all four) that mean a lot to college basketball.
“We’re bringing together the success of Notre Dame’s program in the Big East, and to IU and Purdue in the Big Ten, and now Butler’s had this great run in 2010. So you capture all that together, it makes perfect sense.”
Always did.
