When one sport, one school, one supreme program so dominates a state, you can take its measure with sounds alone. Cock an ear to the sound track of more than a century of basketball in the Bluegrass State and you’ll hear:
The buzz of the Hyatt lobby in advance of a game at Rupp Arena….
The rap of a hammer as Governor Happy Chandler pounds a nail into the floor of Memorial Coliseum to mark the spot from which Joe Hagan’s 48-footer beat Marquette in 1938….
The strains of that same Happy Chandler, a half-century later, leading the crowd in My Old Kentucky Home on Senior Day….