BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Say what you will about Bob Knight’s personal behavior, he built something rare and admirable in his 29 years as head basketball coach at Indiana University. He won national and conference championships without compromising his unversity’s academic integrity. He competed at the top level, year after year, without cheating. He recruited good young men and saw to it that they went to class and graduated. Simply put, he did it the right way.

Other than North Carolina and Kansas, how many programs at large, public universities can truly make that claim? Think about it. Take your time. You won’t come up with more than two or three who meet all the criteria. While others were making compromises, Knight never wavered from his principles. Indiana proved that championship basketball and championship academics were not mutually exclusive.

So the hiring of Kelvin Sampson must be considered withinin the context of what IU has come to sympolize. That being the case, the message is inescapable: The bar has been lowered at Indiana. Instead of being a moral leader, IU now is willing to simply be one of the guys. Future championships — and surely they will come — will be merely a triumph of talent instead of a victory for ideals.

And something mystical, something inherently important to being a Hoosier, will be lost forever.

Let me tell you something about Hoosiers. They are independent cusses. They are stubborn. They are going to do things their way and not much worry what the rest of the nation thinks about it. They have enough common sense and simple decency to believe in the old-fashioned virtues of honesty, modesty, and hard work. But — and this is what is often missed about them — they are dreamers. They have the soul of poets.

In the small towns, especially, the dreams have often been wrapped up in basketball, our nation’s most democratic game. Unlike football, basketball does not require large numbers of participants or expensive equipment. It requires only a couple of hoops, a ball, and five people who have the will to win and the desire to become one, a unit, a team.

The classic movie "Hoosiers," based on the story of Milan High’s improbable Indiana state championship in 1952, captures the essence of being a Hoosier. The story is a soaring tribute to basketball, to dreamers, to underdogs. And then, incredibly, some souless bureaucrats and bean-counters willfully and maliciously murdered the Hoosier spirit in 1997 by splitting the high school basketball tournament into divisions.

Since then, basketball in Indiana has not been the same. Neither has the psyche of many of his residents. One of the things that set Hoosiers apart, that contributed to their identity, was gone. In the culture of high school basketball, where Indiana once ruled supreme, Indiana is now just another state.

And now, sadly, Indiana University has become just another college basketball program.

This isn’t so much a lament on Knight’s firing — although the way it was handled will always be a shameful chapter in the university’s history — as much as it is a lament on IU’s departure from the standards he set. Sampson is a proven winner and, from all accounts, an interesting and admirable human being. But his program at Oklahoma also is currently under NCAA investigation for rules violations. The university had admitted that Sampson and his staff made more than 500 illegal phone calls to recruits.

So, sadly, it has come to this at IU: The powers-that-be, led by a lame-duck president and a secretive athletics director, hired a potential rules-breaker who had no ties to Knight instead of one of the former Knight players who played a significant role in establishing Indiana as a model for doing it the right way in college basketball.

This is more than just an insult to Knight. It’s an insult to Steve Alford, Randy Wittman, Dan Dakich, Jim Crews, and all the other potential candidates who hung the championship banners, received their degrees, and generally brought nothing but glory and respect to Indiana University.

It’s one thing for the IU administration to want to distance itself from the various "incidents" that made Knight the most controversial coach in college basketball history. That can be debated. But it’s wrong, not to mention stupid, for Indiana to distance itself from the principles upon which Knight built his program and operated it for 29 years.

Just as the Indiana state high school basketball tournament has lost the aura and mythology that made it special, so has the Indiana University basketball program surrendered its unique status in college hoops. This is a shame for the university, the state, and for the sport. Might as well get rid of the candy-striped warmup pants, too. They’re symbols of a value system that no longer matters.

It’s just nearly as special to be a Hoosier anymore, is it?