Larry Bird still feels sting of losing perfect record in title game with Indiana State

Heading into this weekend’s Final Four, the consensus among pundits and fans alike seems to be that the NCAA championship is Kentucky’s to lose and that John Calipari and his merry band of future NBA first-rounders will finally end college basketball’s 39-year drought without an undefeated team.

Certainly, Wisconsin will have something to say about that when the teams meet Saturday — just as either Duke or Michigan State will on Monday if the 35-3 Badgers can’t get the job done — but even if the 38-0 Wildcats come up short in their quest for perfection, just getting to where they already are will still be an accomplishment worth noting.

After all, since Indiana won the title at 32-0 in 1976 — a year when an undefeated, Eddie Jordan-led Rutgers team also reached the Final Four — just two teams have advanced as far as this year’s Kentucky squad has without a loss.

The most recent near-miss came in 1991, when Jerry Tarkanian’s high-flying UNLV Rebels entered the tournament 30-0 before eventually losing 79-77 to Duke in the national semifinal. The other came in 1979, when a brash kid named Larry Bird scored at will and took Indiana State — a little school located just 75 miles from the site of this year’s Final Four — to the brink of history, only to let perfection slip away with a championship at stake.

“That was the toughest defeat I’ve ever taken,” the Hall of Famer and current Indiana Pacers president told FOX Sports on Monday when asked about the Sycamores’ 75-64 loss to Magic Johnson and Michigan State in the 1979 championship game. “That was hard, and it’s still hard. We were not expected to get there, and then to get there and have that one opportunity, and then not play well, it’s disappointing.”

It may not be completely accurate to say that the 1978-79 Indiana State team wasn’t expected to be in the championship game, considering that ISU was No. 1 in the country entering the NCAA tournament. But that’s about where the comparisons between Indiana State and Kentucky end.

Because whereas Kentucky opened this season with no one to chase and with many expecting a perfect season from the get-go, Indiana State wasn’t even ranked when its nearly undefeated campaign tipped off and wasn’t considered a true championship contender until long after it had reached the top of the polls.

“With Kentucky, from Day 1 they were No. 1 in the country, and they had some close games, but they’ve got a lot of talent on their team,” said Bird, who led ISU with 28.6 points and 14.9 rebounds per game that season. “They’re about 10 deep on that team, so it’s totally different. People didn’t know anything about me or about my team until we got into the playoffs.”

In 1978, the Sycamores didn’t make an appearance in the national polls until Dec. 12, after wins over East Carolina and Cleveland State at the Hatter Classic in DeLand, Florida, improved Indiana State’s record to 6-0.

By early January, however, the team had cracked the top 10, and not long after, Indiana State found itself in the top five, eventually supplanting Notre Dame atop the AP poll on Feb. 13, at 23-0. A No. 1 ranking in the coaches poll didn’t come for another two weeks, after ISU beat Wichita State 109-84 in the final game of the regular season to put the Sycamores at 26-0 heading into the Missouri Valley Conference tournament.

“We were a mid-major school playing in the Missouri Valley for the first time, and we didn’t dream we’d go undefeated,” Bird said. “We never thought about it, and we just played, but when we got to around 17-0, that’s when we started thinking, ‘Hey, could we go undefeated?’ But you still didn’t think so until the season ended and you look back and go, ‘Wow, 33 in a row? That’s a lot of games.’ ”

The team’s run to 33-0 didn’t come without its share of challenges, however.

In just its third game of the season, Indiana State needed 40 points from Bird to escape Evansville with a 74-70 victory, and two nights later, Bird scored 31 to go with 19 rebounds in a two-point win over Illinois State.

New Mexico State also played the Sycamores close in two of three meetings during the season, losing by four at Terre Haute in Indiana State’s 14th win of the year, then taking ISU to overtime — an extra period made possible by a half-court buzzer beater by ISU’s Bob Heaton — in win No. 19 in Las Cruces.

Then, in the Sycamores’ first game as AP’s No. 1 team, Indiana State barely survived Southern Illinois as Steve Reed made two late free throws to give ISU a 69-68 home win to improve to 24-0.

That victory prompted Sycamores coach Bill Hodges to respond to criticism that his team hadn’t played a tough enough schedule, telling reporters, “We feel we are as good as anyone on a given night and on a neutral court and, on this night, better than UCLA. … The people who are saying that haven't done their research.”

“We had the type of team where everyone knew what their role was,” Bird said. “If you averaged three points, that’s probably what you were going to get and you didn’t try to get 15. The team was very well-rounded, and that made it pretty easy. We had some games that could have gone either way, but we found a way to win, and as we kept going people started talking about us. There were more people around, expectations were higher, and I think we fed off of that.”

Thirty-six years later, Bird calls losing to Michigan State 'heartbreaking.'

After coasting through the Missouri Valley tournament and beating New Mexico State for the third time (in a conference championship game that left Bird with a broken thumb), Indiana State also made quick work of Virginia Tech and Oklahoma in its first two NCAA tournament games. And after two-point wins over Arkansas and DePaul in the regional final and national semifinal, the Sycamores felt they’d proven they deserved their ranking.

“I don’t know if there was really any pressure,” Bird said of the team’s mindset going into the championship game against Michigan State. “There’s nervousness about playing, but we were undefeated and we thought we were invincible. We thought we were going to go in there and win. I’m sure Kentucky feels the same way, but you just never know how you’re going to play that night."

Unfortunately, Indiana State did not play well in its biggest game of the season, and Spartans star Johnson filled the stat sheet with 24 points, seven rebounds and five assists while Michigan State held Bird to just 19 points on 7-of-21 shooting, ending the Sycamores’ bid for perfection just before the finish line.

“Going into the finals, you still think, ‘Well, we’re going to win. If we just play, we’re going to win,’ ” Bird said. “You don’t really feel (unsure) until you’re down by eight or nine with a minute to go. But we felt, or I felt, that somehow we were going to pull it out, and I felt that way until the buzzer went off and we knew it was over.”

After the realization that the 33-0 start was all for naught, the ultra-competitive Bird wasn’t exactly one to look back on what an incredible run it had been.

“You don’t think about how wonderful it was,” Bird said. “You think about, ‘Now what do I do? My career is over.’ You know it’s the last game you’re going to play and you don’t want to go out like that. … You’ve got to give them credit because they were better than any team we’d played, but after that final buzzer, everything was over with. I wasn’t thinking about going pro. I was just thinking about getting out of there and going home.

“It was such a wonderful ride, but with such a letdown at the end, it’s physically just draining, and it was tough to take because when you go that far and you have an opportunity to win a national championship and you don’t do it, it’s really unbearable. It’s heartbreaking.”

And even after 36 years, three NBA championships, three MVPs and a Basketball Hall of Fame induction, it’s a loss that still stings for the legendary former Boston Celtic.

“There would have been nothing better than bringing attention to not only Indiana State, but to Terre Haute and to the state of Indiana, by winning that game,” Bird said. “No one at Indiana State has been back (to the Final Four) since that time. It was a one-shot deal to do it, and we didn’t do it, so it was and is a major letdown.”

As for Kentucky, however, Bird doesn’t anticipate a similar disappointment in the Wildcats’ future.

“I’ve watched them quite a bit,” he said. “We scout them, and I’ve watched them on tape and on TV, and they’re very talented. … I thought that Notre Dame had a great chance at beating them before the game (on Saturday), but they didn’t do it, and now Wisconsin played them tough last year (in a one-point loss in the national semifinal), and they might have an opportunity, too. But still, Kentucky’s got the strongest team, one through 10, of any team in college.

“So I don’t know if they’re going to win the whole thing, but chances are they probably will."

You can follow Sam Gardner on Twitter or email him at samgardnerfox@gmail.com.