Pacers-Bucks: Why I Love Indiana

I love being a Hoosier.

I don't know if anyone else has done this, but if you think of 10 words that describe you, that sum you up, Hoosier will be in my list every time.

If you haven't tried that, I suggest it, it's actually kind of fun and challenging. Also, we love getting to know our readership, so if you want to leave your list in the comments you're more than welcome to it.

Now I have gone way off course. As per tradition with my posts, I digress.

I am an Indiana boy, and actually you'd be surprised how many Hoosiers are actually pretty amped up on being from Indiana. Some of the stereotypes about us are true, but for this article I'm only going to focus on one: Our state's passion for basketball.

Now, not everyone in the state loves the game, but we all know the rules and how to play it. Only our neighboring state of Kentucky knows the game nearly as well as we do. I'm not saying that we're the only ones capable of really understanding the game, just that from birth it's ingrained into our brains.

Nate, the only non-Hoosier on this blog, can attest to this: most of the time, people from a non-basketball area don't really understand why we're all so obsessed.

Honestly, I really don't either, but we are.

I couldn't tell you exactly why I love basketball. I can with my two other favorite sports of baseball and hockey. Yet with basketball I can't. It's just sort of part of me, I guess like being from Indiana or being an American. It just can't be separated from me. I'm sure most Hoosiers would tell you the same.

The reason I post this is because there are events every once in a while that remind me of that. This time, it was what happened Wednesday night.

There is a person on the Pacers Digest boards (the fan forums for the Pacers) who has watched the Pacers for most, if not all, of their 41-year existence. He constantly says that Indianapolis is not an NBA city, and he's right. We're not. In fact, we've almost lost this team twice already.

We are a basketball state, but we'd prefer to watch a college or high school game. Usually the NBA ranks third if you ask us, but also that's not always true. I'll almost always take an NBA game over a college game. That's not to say that we don't love our Pacers though, because we do—and Wednesday was a reminder of that.

Pacers basketball has fallen on hard times. The brawl, the arrests and the personalities involved drove a lot of us from the stadium to invest our time in the local high school team or our favorite college program. The passion for the team was still there, but Indiana is definitely a Midwestern state, in the fact that we generally only support things that match up with our values, which are often defined as "family values."

Then last offseason, everything changed. We made major moves which pretty much dismantled the team, and restocked it with players who loved the game and showed it every night with their effort. Or at least that's what they told us.

The year went by and what they said proved true. They did play hard and they really didn't ever seem to give up. They treated us to close games—maybe too many close games—but we were excited by what we saw.

Yet, although the Pacers were playing hard and making the games fun to watch, people weren't exactly showing up in droves. It just seemed like the word somehow had not reached the majority of the state who still thought, "the Pacers are a team of thugs."

Yet recently, something changed. Out of nowhere people started packing the Fieldhouse. Magically it seemed that people from all corners of the state had heard word about the team assembled in the state capital. For the last eight games of the year the stadium was nearly full, and it was like a playoff atmosphere every night.

Then came Wednesday, which reminded me why I love my state so much.

It was a meaningless game, one that had to be played just because it was scheduled. Wednesday night the Pacers suited up one last time for the year at our cathedral to basketball, Conseco Fieldhouse, to face Milwaukee.

But by the way the crowd reacted, you would have thought it was a playoff game.

To start the fourth the Pacers were down 16, and despite that deficit the crowd was still in it. Then with about eight minutes to spare, the basketball gods came down into our shrine we had built for them—and in front of "Basketball Jesus" (Larry Bird), gave the golden touch to Danny Granger and Brandon Rush.

Anything they threw up fell effortlessly into the basket and with 2:58 left in the season Granger shot from beyond the arc and the masses of Hoosiers in that stadium collectively willed that ball into the hoop. A crowd already on its feet erupted. The Pacers had taken the lead.

It didn't stop there though, the crowd never relented—and neither did the Pacers. The ended the season on an incredible high note with a wonderful come-from-behind victory.

It didn't matter that we didn't make the playoffs, we're Hoosiers, if you play well, that's all the reward we could ever want. We do care about championships, we want them just as much as anyone else, but for this one night, it was our championship.

We won back our team, and they won us back. The future is bright for the Pacers, and I'm sure the state will be with them every step of the way.

So, reason No. 938 of why I love Indiana, we passionately love our teams, regardless of outcomes.