The guy next to me didn’t quite get it.

Late Saturday night, winding down after my desk shift in a local establishment, and, up there on the big-screen TV, for the umpteenth but not last time this night, was The Play: Verdell Jones III flying up the floor, slaloming around one blue Kentucky jersey and then another, stopping, turning, kicking the ball back to Christian Watford.

Who rose up.

And launched a three.

And straight up it went, like the trajectory of Alan Shepard’s first space flight all those years ago, and straight down it came.

Splash. Buzzer. Bedlam.

On the TV screen, the floor of Assembly Hall simply vanished, swallowed up in an immense, frenzied sea of wall-to-wall red after the Hoosiers’ 73-72 victory.

The guy next to me nodded at the screen and said something about how he hates it when the students rush the floor.

“Act like you’ve been there before, you know?” he said.

“That’s the whole point,” I replied. “For the last five, six years, they haven’t been.”

And that, I could have gone on, made the scene in Assembly Hall, that amazing outpouring of pure ecstasy, an expression of blessed relief as much as anything. It’s one thing when you’re a program that has never known success, and you beat No. 1. It’s entirely another when your program has the lineage Indiana’s has, and you’ve had to watch Kelvin Sampson blow it to matchsticks and then suffer through the fallout – three excruciating winters when there was so little visible hope that there were times, surely, when even the most roaring of zealots despaired that IU hoops would ever rise and walk again.

And then here came Kentucky, the oldest and bitterest of rivals. And here was Watford, rising up. And down went No. 1.

When you’ve hardly ever known the wilderness, the return from it becomes that much sweeter. Home truth.

And so Saturday night was for 5-25 and 10-21 and, before that, poor doomed Mike Davis, who courageously took on the impossible job of replacing a fired icon and was cruelly excoriated for not being up to the task. It was an in-your-face to Sampson, who ruined the program but couldn’t, in the end, destroy it. And it was vindication for Tom Crean, who surely had no clue just how bad things were the day he arrived in Bloomington, talking on and on about candy-striped warm-ups and how the reason he was here was because “it’s Indiana.”

As it turned out, it wasn’t. But now, at last, it is again.

The Indiana of Bob Knight. The Indiana of Steve Alford and Quinn Buckner and Isiah Thomas, of Dan Dakich shuttin’ down Michael Jordan and Keith Smart hittin’ The Shot.

The Indiana of Christian Watford, hittin’ The Shot, Part Deux.

Act like you’ve been there before?

Hey. They have.

So party on, dudes.