Jumpin’ Johnny Wilson leapt for joy there. Oscar Robertson kicked racial assumptions to shards there. And, yes, Bobby Plump hit the Shot Heard ’Round The World there, on a March night in 1954 that resonates in this state to this day.

Lucas Grose didn’t get to do any of that Saturday in Hinkle Fieldhouse.

Instead, he and his Warsaw teammates took the floor in an ordinary gym at an ordinary Indiana high school over in Rochester – thanks not to the Indiana High School Athletic Association but the NCAA, which once again was acting against its own principles.

Allegedly it’s in the business of protecting the welfare of the “student-athletes” under its purview. I’ve got condos selling below market on the moon if you buy that.

What the NCAA is really in the business of is protecting its business, and anyone with a functioning brain stem knows it. And so, under a cotton-headed bylaw passed last April, it forbid Butler University, an NCAA member institution, from hosting an in-season high school basketball tournament in Hinkle.

Deeming the planned Big Rivals tournament “non-scholastic,” the NCAA – the day before the tournament, no less – enforced Bylaw 13.11.1.18, which prohibits an NCAA institution from hosting “non-scholastic” basketball events in which “prospective student-athletes” compete. And since every basketball player on every high school team in the nation is a “prospective student-athlete” … well, sorry, boys.

You can take Oscar and Bobby and everyone else who made Hinkle the Louvre of high school basketball, and stick ’em where the sun don’t shine. If you’re a high school basketball player in Indiana, you’re no longer allowed to play in the House That High School Basketball Built unless it’s part of the state tournament.

I know what I think about that, as a native Hoosier. Unfortunately this is a family publication, so I can’t properly express it here.

What I will say is this yet another example of the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight aiming at one target and hitting another. The intent of Bylaw 13.11.1.18, supposedly, was to get AAU and other sketchy offseason “tournaments” off its campuses – part of a larger attempt to rein in the influence of those organizations on its “prospective student-athletes.”

In other words: They can’t exploit our athletes like that. Only we can exploit our athletes like that.

Either that, or get their cut trying.

I suspect the latter is behind its decree that the Big Rivals tournament was “non-scholastic,” a frankly absurd designation. All the schools involved were IHSAA members. So just how was it “non-scholastic”?

In truth, shutting down tournaments such as Big Rivals was never the intent of Bylaw 13.11.1.18, but the NCAA can’t seem to help itself. It’s such a captive of its own Draconian self-interest it went ahead and applied 13.11.1.18 anyway, once again hurting its “prospective student-athletes” rather than protecting them.

When push comes to shove, after all, whose welfare is protected by jobbing Indiana kids out of playing in Indiana’s most hallowed venue? Whose best interests are advanced by throwing them out of the place where Oscar played and Plump hit the Shot and, in the Hollywood version, Ollie climbed up on Strapp’s shoulders to measure the rim?

Wrong questions. The right question is this: Whose bottom line is being protected?

I think we all know the answer to that one.