Column: Ghosts from championships’ past

You couldn’t erase the smile from Daryl Thomas’ glowing face as he spoke about the 1987 Championship Team and the way things were.

“Did you see those shorts we wore?” Thomas said with a smile. “Jesus, those little short, tight things. I think it should be illegal to walk around outside in something on that small.”

Thomas stood alongside his teammates during halftime of IU’s 84-50 victory against Stetson on Sunday in a line at half court without their curmudgeon of a head coach. The cheers during that 25th anniversary ceremony were the loudest of the game up to that point.

And for those few minutes before the second half, I began to understand.

I understood the pride and love this state has for Hoosier basketball and why Assembly Hall still draws sizeable crowds despite not having won a title during my lifetime. I at least got an inkling of exactly how dominant IU was during the Bob Knight era.

“I said this to the ’87 team today when had a chance to see them,” IU Coach Tom Crean said. “No one signed up obviously for what happened four seasons ago, but the fact that the former players continued to come back here and be a part of this, I think it showed the fans that, ‘Hey, the program is big. This program is really big. We may be going through a tough situation, but the players love the program. It’s always been about how they feel about the program based on the tradition that’s been here.’”

That portion of IU’s last championship-winning team was together on Branch McCracken Court for the first time in a quarter century.

That hardwood might have been the only commonality between the program when they played to it now. The looming shadow cast upon IU basketball by the ’87 team and its predecessors has made it difficult for anyone in the last 11 years since Knight was fired to live up to expectations.

During Knight’s 28-year tenure in Bloomington, IU was 662-239 for a .737 winning percentage, won three NCAA Championships and chronicled the last perfect season in NCAA history.

Indiana basketball is not back if applied by those standards. I’m not sure if Indiana basketball will ever be able to get back to that point due to the current climate of college basketball.

IU has certainly started the long, steep climb back to that point after being knocked off the mountain by Kelvin Sampson. But the man who sunk the infamous shot to hang the Hoosiers’ fifth banner is itching for the program that he and his teammates love so much to return to greatness.

“They know we’re supporting them 100 percent because we said we want to be like those other guys, and we want to be able to go to a Final Four or Championship Game and be in the stands and have our IU clothing that fit us now,” ’87 guard Keith Smart said before Sunday’s game. “We see other teams and other players that played at those schools are at the games and at Final Fours, and we want to be there. We want to be part of that as well.”

The presence of the ’87 Championship Team was a potent reminder of the way things were and a glimpse into what it must have been like to for many, like me, who didn’t live through it.

Thomas’s shorts haven’t gotten any less embarrassing, but they represent a time when IU basketball was king — a time that many are wondering will ever come again.

­— azaleon@indiana.edu