Indiana State has its best team since Larry Bird. Will it be enough to get them in the NCAA Tournament?

This March wouldn't be nearly as mad without Cream Abdul-Jabbar, Josh Schertz and one of college basketball's most entertaining teams

For all the ecstasy it provides, there’s a certain cruelty to March.

Teams spend four months putting together a resume that might give them a shot, however miniscule it might be, to compete against 67 other teams for a national championship, but with a single mistake at the wrong time – a missed free throw, a pass that had just a little too much zip on it or a ball simply taking an inopportune bounce – those dreams can disappear, as if everything that led up to that moment never occurred.

For a sizable percentage of Division I schools that exist outside the seven or eight leagues that routinely get multiple teams in the NCAA Tournament, this time of year is a humbling reminder of what caste they inhabit in this chaotic little fiefdom.

If it wasn’t already aware of that, Indiana State men’s basketball learned of it this past weekend.

On Sunday, the Sycamores, nearing a potential climax to one of the greatest seasons in program history, lost to Drake 84-80 in the Missouri Valley Tournament championship game, a thrilling, closely-contested matchup between two teams that both shot over 50% from the field. The win sent Drake – the Des Moines, Iowa school, not the Canadian rapper – to its third NCAA Tournament in the past four years, where the Bulldogs will undoubtedly be a popular upset pick.

For Indiana State, its immediate future is much more uncertain and much less enjoyable.

At 28-6, the Sycamores have spent the bulk of the 2023-24 season as one of the sport’s feel-good stories, a mid-major program from a basketball-mad state that was having the kind of success it hadn’t experienced since one of the greatest basketball players of all-time magically graced its campus. But with the unforgivable sin of a four-point loss to another team with a 28-6 record it’s quite possible that a dream season won’t end with a trip to their sport’s marquee event.

Again, March can be cruel. Indiana State might soon find out just how much.

The rise and fall of Indiana State basketball

Any mention of Indiana State basketball likely begins and ends with a single person.

Over his three seasons at the school, Larry Bird led the Sycamores to previously unimaginable heights, including a No. 1 national ranking and a 33-0 record that they carried into the 1979 national championship, where they lost to Magic Johnson and Michigan State in what remains the most important game in college basketball history.

That he ever ended up at Indiana State is something of its own story. Bird had originally signed to play for Bob Knight at Indiana, about 50 miles directly north of his hometown of where he grew up, but the adjustment from his 2,000-person hometown to a sprawling campus housing an undergraduate student body of more than 30,000 overwhelmed the 17 year old.

"People naturally think it was trouble between Knight and me, but it wasn't," Bird once said. "The school was just too big. I was a homesick kid who was lost and broke."

He left the school without ever playing a game, returned home and worked for a year before giving college another try, this time at Indiana State.

What he managed to accomplish there, and the fact he ever suited up for the Sycamores to begin with, could have been a springboard for Indiana State, a necessary catalyst for the program to achieve the kind of sustained success that had eluded it up until that point.

Ultimately, it wasn’t.