I wrote about my experiences at the WIAA state basketball tournaments in this space last week. (Including, of course, my junior-year experience that ended with a big gold trophy and bigger plaque on the wall at my high school.)

After last week’s excellent experience (two teams, two state titles), I get to add another today and perhaps Saturday, because I am covering undefeated Mineral Point at 7:45 tonight on www.superhits106.com. (And Saturday if the Pointers win.)

This will be the first time I’ve announced the boys tournament since 1989, when the Class C field included three unbeaten teams, the first of which won when a 60-foot shot at the buzzer rimmed out. My game was a wild 81–79 win for Glenwood City over Iowa–Grant.

I also did a Class B game the same day featuring Cuba City and Clintonville. I didn’t know this at the time, but I would later end up living in Cuba City, getting to know the all-time-winningest boys basketball coach in Wisconsin history (whose memories of state can be read here), and covering Clintonville as an opponent of Ripon later. (In the space of a few days last week I interviewed said all-time-winningest boys coach, the all-time-winningest girls coach, and the coach who has the most gold trophies at Cuba City High School.)

Cuba City and Iowa–Grant are answers to a strange trivia question — in which tournament were all the state champions from Grant County. The answer is 1981 — Iowa–Grant won Class C, Cuba City won Class B, and Class A was won by … no one. Milwaukee Madison beat Wausau West to win the Class A title game, but Madison’s title was vacated for use of an ineligible player. The WIAA chose to not award the title to Wausau West, so officially there was no 1981 Class A champion.

(I just remembered the first time I’d ever heard of Cuba City, and it wasn’t at state. In the late 1970s I was part of an Explorer post hosted by WHA-TV. One of the things we did was to push a WHA float in a Madison Christmas parade the same year as Fidel Castro’s emptying of his prisons into boats for Jimmy Carter to deal with. Behind us was the Cuba City band, which spent much of the parade chanting: “Gimme an R! Gimme an E! … What’s that spell? REFUGEES!” Really funny, and of course you could not possibly do that today.)

The 1989 games (and 1981, and all of them between the move from the Big Red Gym and the move to the Kohl Center) were at the UW Fieldhouse, great for atmosphere and little else. The radio broadcast positions were at the front of the upper deck, great for visibility except for those with vertigo. The Kohl Center was built to follow the Fieldhouse’s sight lines as much as possible, which is why it’s a great place to watch basketball, though much larger than the Fieldhouse.

Mineral Point is making its first appearance since 1974. The Pointers that year won their first Class C game but lost to another unbeaten team, McFarland. If the Pointers win tonight, their next opponent is either third-ranked Eau Claire Regis or, more likely, three-time defending Division 4 champion Whitefish Bay Dominican, led by the state’s most sought-after senior, Diamond Stone. (Rumored to be choosing between Wisconsin, Maryland, Connecticut or Oklahoma State for college.) If Dominican and Mineral Point play Saturday, I will have to learn how to pronounce the last name of one of Stone’s teammates, Kostas Antetokounmpo, brother of the Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo.

Wisconsinites might remember Gary Bender, who went from WKOW-TV in Madison to CBS-TV. He announced this state tournament, in addition to the Badgers and the Packers: When I was an intern at WKOW-TV, there was a black-and-white photo of Bender and some other people at state. Bender wore a white turtleneck, a blazer, plaid polyester bell-bottoms, and white shoes. I wonder if channel 27 still has that photo.