Every now and again a sports team comes along that captures the essence of a people. It sounds cliché and the card gets overplayed, but on rare occasions it really does happen. And it’s happening now for the people of Indiana in the form of the 2010 national runner-up and the now somehow-Final-Four-bound Butler Bulldogs, led by their young and collected coach Brad Stevens, from Indianapolis. It’s impossible to quantify when it happens and it’s hard to express exactly how it happens, but we — the people of Indiana — can feel it, and we’re grateful for it. 

Thank you Butler.

In Indiana we play basketball. It sounds cliché, but it’s true and you can try to quantify this. During Butler’s most recent tournament wins over Wisconsin and Florida, for instance, you could've noted that Indiana has about three times as many Division I basketball players as Wisconsin, even though the two states’ populations are nearly identical, or that Indiana colleges have produced 14 Final Four teams compared to the state of Florida's 5, even though Florida has about three times as many people as Indiana. But basketball runs deeper in our veins than stats like this.  

When we watch Butler play basketball we’re reminded of the time we spent with our dads when we were 5 years old and of what our coaches taught us when we were 6 and 7. Whether it's watching a dribble-drive to set up a backdoor, a sweet stroke from deep that draws nothing but net, or a lefty hook that represents thousands of hours of practice from Butler's academic All-American Matt Howard, we can relate. Growing up, we practiced the same things for hours.  

As fate had it, in fact, as a teenager I practiced these same things with Brad Stevens. We played basketball together on an AAU team out of Bloomington, Indiana. On the Stevens’ driveway, Brad and I spent hours playing one-on-one against each other, and on the road we roomed together. We talked hoops, analyzed players, and dreamt about the future.

We were learning then, just as Indianans have been learning for a hundred years, that the rhythms of life in Indiana work well when they’re structured around basketball: hone your game with buddies outdoors in the summer and then in the winter live and die with your teammates through every game of the season, barely aware of the bitter cold, ever-hopeful that spring and the tournament — at your local Y or grade school or high school — would bring sunny days. Butler reminds us of this beautiful cycle yet again. 

Indianans watching Butler can relate to all of it. We've felt the euphoria of beating a team no one thought we could because we moved the ball and shot it well. We’ve felt the moment of uncertainty that can come before a late-game free throw, and we’ve felt that moment of calm that occurs when you’re backpedaling alone on defense after you just drained a deep one and no one else is back yet. We’ve felt this because in Indiana we can shoot the basketball.

And just like when Butler lost four of five games in January, to the likes of Youngstown State, no less, we’ve endured rough stretches, too — on the court and off. As with the rest of America, the recent economic woes have been hard on Indiana. Counties like Elkhart have faced unemployment rates in the teens, and current budget battles have motivated statehouse Democrats to a hideout in Illinois. Republican state representatives, in the meantime, have tried to punish the Dems by raising their daily fines for being absent. But no matter how ugly it gets or where our politicians hole up, we’re all watching Butler in the NCAA Tournament.  

And, oh, how Butler has picked us up again. Just weeks ago the New York Daily News wrote, fairly enough, that “Cinderella [Butler] is unlikely to be found on any of the mock 68-team brackets.” But then Butler fought its way to the Horizon League tournament championship. Now it's in its mind-boggling second Final Four in a row. Frank Sinatra might’ve sung about getting shot down in May and working your way back on top in June, but Butler is reminding the nation that in Indiana we shoot our way back in March.

Maybe this is why the people of Indiana are so grateful for Butler. We’re a prideful lot, especially when it comes to basketball. And yet, as distant as it now seems with Butler’s rise, from 2002-08 some of our basketball luster got lost. The Indiana high school state basketball tournament had gone to a multi-class format, making a real-life remake of the fabled Milan squad — the small-town team celebrated in Hoosiers — impossible, at least on the high school level. And for much of this stretch the Purdue Boilermakers and Indiana Hoosiers weren’t among the nation’s elite, partly because so many Indiana players who would get drafted in the NBA’s first round went to out-of-state schools, players like Greg Oden, Mike Conley, Courtney Lee, Josh McRoberts, and Sean May. 

During this period, then, people started to worry — in Indiana and elsewhere — that perhaps Indiana’s great basketball tradition was dead, or at least nearly so. You could try to point out that it wasn’t, that during these “lean” years the Indianapolis-area alone was developing, on average, more than one NBA first-round pick per year, which is statistically insane, but it didn’t seem to matter much. And it didn’t seem clear how we could break through, how we could let people across the nation, and the world for that matter, know that basketball was still in our blood, that we still considered basketball, with all due respect to everyone else, ours.

But then came Butler and Brad Stevens. Thank you for showing the world that in Indiana we still live basketball.