By Bob Markus

There's something faintly familiar about Saturday's semi-final matchup featuring Michigan State against a little known school from Indiana. Haven't we seen this game before? Well, almost. With the Spartans reaching the Final Four for the sixth time in 12 years and playing a Butler team that made it for the first time ever, its a pretty simple segue back to 1979 when Michigan State and Magic Johnson beat Indiana State and Larry Bird in what is still the most watched NCAA final game ever. Except that it might be better to compare Butler's appearance in the big dance's last tango with the high school team in the movie "Hoosiers" than with the Bird-led Sycamores. That's not a knock against Butler, which comes into Saturday's showdown with a 24-game winning streak. That's impressive, but keep in mind that Indiana State came into the 1979 championship game with a 33-0 record and was the No.1 ranked team in the Final AP poll. The Sycamores were expected to get to the finals; Butler's Bulldogs weren't.

Similarly, this year's Michigan State run to the Final Four was much more unexpected than the '79 team's great waltz. Michigan State lost four games that year and I covered three of them for the Chicago Tribune. They might have been world beaters the rest of the year but they were 0 and 3 when I saw them. They must have been delighted when they found out I wasn't covering the Final Four. They played their worst game of the year at Northwestern, played so badly that Coach Jud Heathcote benched Johnson and the rest of the starters before the first half was over. The other two games I saw them lose were stunners. Purdue upset the Spartans on a buzzer beater from about 35 feet out. But that was nothing compared to their loss at Wisconsin, where guard Wes Mathews drained a shot from the center circle as time expired. The Purdue game was made even more memorable for me by the circumstances under which I covered it. It was played on a Saturday afternoon, with tipoff scheduled for 4 p.m. if I remember correctly. I decided to take my son, Mike, who was 8 at the time, and we set out after breakfast for the 140 mile drive from our home in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka to the campus in West Lafayette, Ind. There was a steady drizzle the whole way, but the trip was uneventful. But by the time the game was over and I had filed my story, the drizzle had turned to snow and as we started back home the weather reports on the radio were ominous. Dangerous conditions. Don't drive unless you absolutely have to. I thought about checking into a motel for the night. The Tribune would have paid for it. But I thought about it only fleetingly before I remembered that a few weeks earlier I had interviewed members of the Minnesota basketball team, which had been snowbound for two days after a game at Purdue.

Fortunately, traffic was light, mostly a few trucks which helped clear a path for us as we proceeded at about 30 miles an hour. It seemed to take forever before I took a left turn off Sheridan Rd. onto our street, Willow Rd. Just one more left turn to go and we'd be safely home. But I never made that turn. Instead my car buried itself in a two-foot snow bank and it was obvious it was going no farther on this night. I went to the front door and rang the bell. My wife opened the door and said, "Hi, guess what happened?" Remembering the many radio reports of garage roofs caving in under the weight of the near-record snow, I replied, "The garage collapsed." Bingo! I called the police and told them about my car being out on the street and then went to bed at about 3 in the morning. Such are the pleasures of covering college basketball in the midwest.

I covered another memorable Purdue game that year, memorable mostly because neither of the two teams' stars would consent to be interviewed after the game. Purdue center Joe Barry Carroll was one of the silent stars and the other, of course, was Bird. Except for the fact that Indiana State won and the postgame silent treatment I don't recall anything about that game.

There are no Larry Birds or Magic Johnsons in this year's Final Four, just four hard-working teams that managed to survive two weeks of bracket-busting or, as in the cases of Butler (twice) and West Virginia, contributed to the rash of upsets. Only hard core basketball fans or fans of the teams involved could name more than one or two players on the four teams, but three of the coaches are household names--in more than a few households. West Virginia's Bob Huggins has a championship ring from his days coaching Cincinnati and Duke's Mike Kryzyewski has two, along with 11 Final Four appearances. Vastly underrated is Michigan State's Tom Izzo, whose six Final Fours in a dozen years are the most of any coach during that time span. Butler's coach is pretty much unknown to everybody outside the state of Indiana, including me. But, playing in their hometown, the Bulldogs have a chance to change that if they can win just two more games. The first step comes Saturday when they get to answer the question of the day: Izzo is or Izzo not my baby.