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There was barely enough time to process the shock and awe of Jalen Suggs’ buzzer-beater before the procession of Houston and UCLA fans through hotel lobbies began Sunday morning. It’s a ritual as old as the Final Four, played out this year on a much smaller scale but not making it any easier to procure the services of Indianapolis’ lone taxicab.
If anything, the streets of Indianapolis felt more festive during the opening days of the tournament, when there were 68 tiny fan bases jockeying for hotel rooms and restaurant reservations. The banners on the skywalks and buildings haven’t changed in three weeks; they all trumpeted the Final Four back then, when the city was busier than it is now, an inverse of the usual process.
It’s another case of the constant COVID quandary: For everything that feels like normal times again, there’s a slap in the face to remind that it isn’t. Nevertheless, we’re a few sets of negative COVID tests from getting to the end of an improbable NCAA tournament that, for all the upheaval of the season, delivered the two teams everyone expected back in November.
Four months since Gonzaga and Baylor had a keenly anticipated nonconference meeting in Indianapolis scrapped at the last minute due to COVID, they’ll play there for a national title Monday night. Gonzaga has been No. 1 all season; Baylor, except for a brief quiver in February, No. 2. The unpredictable season delivered the most predictable ending.
Indianapolis has hosted enough Final Fours that there’s a predictable, recognizable rhythm to the city during these weekends, from the team buses pulling up outside St. Elmo’s steakhouse with howling IndyCar escorts to the crowds of partisans that fill the streets and the fan festival in the convention center. That’s been lacking, even before seekers of St. Elmo’s famous sinus-immolating shrimp cocktail were denied when the steakhouse shut down Saturday night after several COVID cases among the staff.
The streets aren’t exactly empty this weekend, but they are certainly subdued. A pedestrian mall that’s usually a solid wall of happy, day-drinking people taking selfies with a giant Final Four logo didn’t look much different than it might on a normal sunny spring Saturday or Sunday. A band played at one end, but there were only a few dozen people listening, gathered around socially distanced fire pits. A street preacher was the loudest noise for blocks. The convention center sits quiet and empty, with no fan fest or coaches’ convention.
Yet this is still a triumph over insurmountable odds, given the ACC tournament lost two of its quarterfinalists in two days and the NCAA lost six of its best officials before the tournament even started due to a positive test among them. It’s easy to take for granted now the improbability of pulling this off, with only one team leaving early due to COVID. (And the women’s tournament lost none.)
It wasn’t just the virus; it was the logistics. Planning for a normal NCAA tournament takes years. Raleigh had been preparing to host the first and second rounds at PNC Arena this month since 2017, when the last-second repeal of HB2 saved five years of NCAA championships in the state. The NCAA and Indianapolis had to throw this together in a matter of months, and not merely the usual variables of hotels and sites and charter flights, but the construction of a bubble secure enough to ensure this wasn’t mere folly.
Three weeks ago, cops guarded barriers around four downtown hotels and the convention center, keeping even pedestrians at a distance, while fleets of buses traversed the city and stopped traffic like military convoys. The wail of motorcycle sirens was constant. By Sunday, the citadel was down to one hotel. The pickleball competition concluded with Gonzaga coach Mark Few and Baylor coach Scott Drew undefeated as partners. The occupation was over.
Only Indianapolis could have pulled this off on such short notice, because only Indianapolis has the practice. That was driven home by the banners hanging on the giant black curtain in Lucas Oil Stadium, representing all eight of Indianapolis’ Final Fours, including three that saw Duke victorious. Hanging apart from, but next to those, was the banner with the Atlanta logo from the 2020 tournament that went unplayed, that slap in the face that’s never far behind.
The NCAA’s headquarters are within sight of the giant bracket on the giant glass wall of the JW Marriott, newly updated Sunday morning, but there was more than logistics in the decision to play the tournament in Indiana. It was also a nod to the state’s reverence for the game of basketball, with tournament games also played at Purdue and Indiana and, especially, the shrine that is Butler’s Hinkle Fieldhouse.
Hinkle was the stage for the climactic scene of “Hoosiers,” where tiny Hickory High upsets mighty South Bend Central for the state title on Jimmy Chitwood’s buzzer-beater, a fictional spin on Milan’s famous 1954 state championship. (Bobby Plump, the star of that team and the model for Chitwood, now owns a bar in the Broad Ripple neighborhood called Plump’s Last Shot.)
The Hickory home games were filmed in a gym about 40 minutes east of Indianapolis in Knightstown, which some 35 years later remains unchanged, right down to the locker rooms in the basement. It’s a museum now, used for a high school all-star game, but mostly just open for anyone who loves the game or the movie or both to take a look around and take a few shots.
The day before the tournament started, three weeks and change ago, several families were there, kids getting up jumpers while the parents bought T-shirts. The road to the Final Four comes to an end Monday in a gigantic football stadium, but it started in places like Knightstown long ago. They’re both worth a pilgrimage.
So you may ask, why go through the trouble of playing this tournament — this season, even — in a pandemic, with all the extra effort and privations? Money, yes. This is big business. But there’s also a connection between a pre-teen making a layup in a sepia-tinted old gym and Suggs’ answered prayer to beat UCLA on Saturday night. It’s the basketball that brings us back.
A year after this tournament was lost, it was ventured and, now, all but completed.
Was it the same? No. Was it worth doing? Unquestionably.
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