Loyola-Chicago is in the Final Four, and it’s a feel-good story about an oft-forgotten organization that once had a big name in college basketball but was left behind as money and prominence took over the sport.
And Loyola has made a nice comeback, too.
I’m speaking, of course, about the Missouri Valley Conference, the great conference that over the years has stretched from New Mexico to Ohio.
The conference of Bob Kurland and Oscar Robertson and Larry Bird. The league that in many ways was the Big East before the Big East ever existed.
From 1945 through 1979, the Valley was a better basketball conference than most of what today we call the Power 5.