O.K. people - I'm sure you have memories of games with wild outcomes, weird stuff happening, great games, and so forth. Lets hear them.

I remember the 1979 NCAA college basketball championship game well.....which means I'm one of the older posters here. It was played on 3/26/79 which means 40 years ago last Tuesday.

It still holds the record for the highest rated game in college basketball history . The Sycamores vs. the Spartans. Wonder how many folks know what college the Sycamores refer to. Probably quite a few. And I wonder how many folks know the only reason the Sycamores were in that game, or even in the tourney.

Of course the only reason was they had the slow white player who couldn't jump very high - The Hick from French Lick, Larry Bird.

Back then only 40 teams made the playoffs. Four Divisions with 10 colleges from each.

So Michigan State (who I assume everybody knows is in the final four again this year) vs. Indiana State whose only trip to the championship game was vs. Michigan State that year - who had the great Magic Johnson.

The Spartans won because they triple teamed Bird all the time because the rest of the players were mediocre. The Spartans other players were good and if memory serves - they had a player named Greg Kelser who I think was very good

With Bird - Indiana State went 33-1, only losing the championship game. Michigan State finished 26-6 but had a tougher conference to compete in.

Anyway - after this, Bird and Magic propped up the NBA from its doldrums big time with Bird on the Celtics and Magic on the Showtime Lakers (when Jack Nicholson sat court side at all he home games)

And it seemed these two premiere teams in the NBA were trading the NBA championships back and forth in the 80's until Magic announced he had HIV AIDS & had to quit because everybody was scared they might catch it from him.

It was also in the times when the majority of people who got AIDS ended up dead. But Magic always kept his body & health in tip top shape & he could easily afford this new cocktail of drugs where you could still carry on pretty well.

Also Birds back was a mess in his last 3-4 years of pro ball & he would be laying flat on his back on the sidelines when it was too painful to play & his orthopedic guy said Larry's back kept literally slipping out of place and had to have it operated on to get it in the right place again.

What seems crazy now is that Bird went to Indiana & Bobby Knight out of high school - but left and hitchhiked home (he came from a working class family that was poorer than Magic's) before he ever played in a game because he wasn't used to the big time college atmosphere & the big time A-hole Bobby Knight.

He got a job doing maintenance work like mowing the grass & stuff in the city/county parks of French Lick. But the coach from Indiana State thought he'd try one more time to get Larry to play college ball and the rest is - well, he went from being The Hick From French Lick to Larry Legend.