While Gonzaga has crushed its foes, Indiana had close calls on its way to perfection in 1976

Well, the funny thing about those Hoosiers (32-0) who went wire-to-wire at No. 1 is their dissimilarity to Gonzaga, which has gone wire-to-almost-wire at No. 1 this season and aims to equal Indiana at this Final Four. The Bulldogs (30-0) famously have won by double digits every time but one, which might not be fun for their victims but at least spares them walking around life wincing every now and then about the what-ifs. Regarding Bob Knight’s most famous team, it can be striking to anyone who didn’t live in Indiana or follow the team game by game to go poring into the details of game accounts.

They had a rugged schedule and hairy occasions.

“They were prepared, and they were tough,” said Wayman Britt, 66, who captained the Michigan team that lost thrice to Indiana, including in the national championship game, and who will retire in July as the County Administrator of Kent County, Mich.

They weren’t escapists per se, but they faced and then solved problem after problem, which might seem more impressive than the routs.

“That was a great team, no question about it,” Britt said. “They were stout. They had a system. Rock-solid.” Also: “They could have been beaten.”

Their fans’ nerve endings took a serial fraying, and their opponents a serial replaying.

“Aw, man, I replay that stuff all the time,” Britt said.

He joins those players from that season who can relive the ITAL almosts END every time they hear a mention of Indiana 1975-76. Indiana’s 32 games included 11 decided by single digits, which included two decided by five points, one by four, two by three, one by two and two in overtime — against Kentucky in Louisville’s Freedom Hall on Dec. 15, and against Michigan in Indiana’s Assembly Hall on Feb. 7.

Those last two, wins Nos. 4 and 19, shared a strange and frenzied trait. Both saw Indiana down by two with regulation time about to croak. Both saw Indiana tie the game on freakish follows by 6-foot-10 center Kent Benson. Kentucky led 64-62 with nine seconds left until Benson’s tap-in for which he “stuck a hand barely more than waist-high,” as wrote the estimable Bob Hammel of the Bloomington Herald-Telephone. After Michigan led 39-29 at halftime and 55-47 with 9:35 left, it led 60-58 with the end straight ahead and the action frantic, when Quinn Buckner missed from up top and Jim Crews shrewdly redirected the ball from the left baseline across the basket to Benson on the right for a putback.

Should Benson’s tap have counted as a controlled shot, which mattered in the rules for buzzer-beaters? Did he go over Phil Hubbard’s back and warrant a whistle that never, ever, ever would have come with the crowd and Knight both against the idea?

People — get this — disagree.

Here’s Britt, who often stopped to laugh during these passages: “Benson over the top of Phil Hubbard. … We got letters from all over the country about that. … They should have waved that off. Tragic. Tragic. Yeah, we got robbed.” … “A tough pill to swallow because we knew we were that good. Knight knew it, too. Before the game he was telling us how great we were.” … “A hostile environment. Doing to them what they didn’t want to have done. Everybody’s against you. The refs. That fan base always was. Knight just had the environment controlled.”

And then this: “The tip-in. That’s the essence of the game right there, like, ‘What in the world?’ Benson comes over the top and tips that thing in, and they didn’t call it. Come on. If we could do it all over again, I’d bet you a hundred bucks we would beat them.” He paused. “Because I’d take more shots,” for one thing.

Indiana played that season as one of those occasional sports teams motivated by a horror that concluded a previous year — in this case, the 92-90 loss to Kentucky in the 1975 Mideast Region final in Dayton that left the Hoosiers 31-1 and made them wonder what might have been had the great Scott May not broken his arm in late February.

In its 1975-76 mission, it had other inconveniences:

It had to go to a stall — a stall! — to hold off a charging Notre Dame, 63-60, back when college basketball had no shot clock and people would sit around watching stalls. It trailed St. John’s 65-63 in Madison Square Garden before winning, 76-69. It never led Ohio State by more than six in Columbus, traded off a missed layup and won, 66-64. It won, 80-74, always close, at Michigan. It trailed Purdue 60-59 with 6:30 left at Bloomington and won, 71-67, and trailed Purdue 27-16 in West Lafayette, Ind., and won, 74-71.

In a Mideast Region semifinal in Baton Rouge, with a banner on the scorer’s table clunkily reading “GO TIGERS,” Coach C.M. Newton’s excellent SEC champions from Alabama led 69-68 before May hit a 17-footer with 2:02 left. Final score: 74-69.

In a case of the teams ranked Nos. 1 and 2 playing each other in a regional final because people had no idea what they were doing back then, Indiana led Marquette only 57-54 before seeing a good-looking Bo Ellis shot for Marquette roll off with 51 seconds left, then making free throws to win, 65-56, as play-by-play man Don Fischer acknowledged the moment the Hoosiers surpassed the stage of their 1975 nightmare. “I want to tell you, everybody right here at the table with us is just shaking,” he said in the broadcast. “A tremendous emotional win for Indiana.”

And then, win No. 32, in Philadelphia: At 17:17 of the first half, Indiana had a mainstay, the 6-foot-7 senior Bobby Wilkerson, take an inadvertent elbow and wind up motionless on the floor. He went off on a stretcher, got a diagnosis of a concussion and ended up at Temple University Hospital. Indiana had a 35-29 deficit at halftime, a 51-51 tie with 10 minutes left.

It won the rest by 35-17 to close at 86-68. As May told reporters that night: “We’ve been behind before. We’re used to it.” As Britt said: “I don’t know. There’s a number of things, man. You know, people get momentum. They start to click, if you will. They start to see things and make the adjustments, and that’s what happens.”

Unlike with this Gonzaga team thus far, the margins had been so small so often. To this day, 45 years on, it makes Britt pinpoint one factor: Indiana’s place back then at the vanguard of fitness training.

“We weren’t doing that,” Britt said. “We only had a leg weight machine. They were physically more styled. We were just quick. We didn’t do that [the level of training]. They had started that.” So: “I’d run a few more miles. I’d do a few more push-ups. I’d go to bed earlier than I did. That’s what I would do to make sure I was ready. We did not develop the science of basketball to the extent we could have, back in the day. … You look at that team and how strong they were: Benson, May, Buckner. These guys were hefty. Hefty. Very mature, strong people. They were men. We didn’t have that. We had some skinny guys — quick, talented” — and younger.

In a sport in which enduring legacies turn on capricious moments often enough the whole thing can seem, yeah, mad, don’t forget Indiana in 1975-76, great and much discussed and just a tap or two from being less discussed.