Editor’s note: Travis Barrett is ranking his top 10 sports movies of all-time. No. 4 “Hoosiers” is more than a basketball movie.

“Hoosiers” is a basketball movie, sure.

But having grown up in central Maine, having now spent the better part of more than four decades in this area and seeing the fervor, passion and sometimes dangerous attention paid to the state’s high school basketball tournaments each February, I also know basketball is only part of why “Hoosiers” is so good and continues to resonate almost 35 years after its release.

 

Gene Hackman’s Norman Dale is the besmirched basketball coach given his one final shot at the game.

Jimmy Chitwood is the haunted, mysterious star player dealt a difficult hand both in and out of the game.

Myra Fleener is the educator trapped in a small town’s obsession with its game and its star athletes.

Shooter Flatch is the town drunk, the former high school star who never copes in adulthood with his best days having come during his teens.

And there’s a fine character ensemble, too, comprising a concerned community, a misplaced identity and bullying parents.

 

That all of it is set in a little town in Indiana 70 years ago, and yet remains so contemporary in its issues, is remarkable.

I’m not much of a basketball fan, if we’re being totally honest. I don’t follow the National Basketball Association, I don’t watch much college basketball and growing up I had stopped playing the game by the time I was 14 years old. I went to many of my high school teams’ games and enjoyed being part of raucous student sections, but once I graduated I never went back to check in on the teams or watch any of the games.

In terms of “Hoosiers,” I’m more Myra Fleener than Norman Dale. Even to this day, in my current profession where tournament week is high priority and high drama, I’ve often wondered about the pressures and attention communities are placing on the shoulders of adolescents. What should be “just a basketball game” is often much more than that, a life-defining moment — win or lose, succeed or fail — with consequences that feel much more severe than they ought to be.

As always in the best sports movies out there, there are many life lessons — and the role of the coach to impart those lessons is a heavy one. When Dale tells his team prior to the state semifinal that he doesn’t want his team to think about winning or losing, or about the final result, that he just wants them to concentrate on playing the kind of basketball they’ve prepared to play to the best of their potential, it feels like he really means it.

He tells the little Hickory team that, win or lose, they’ll be winners in his book.

As a high school basketball writer in central Maine, I’ve heard those words or some variation of them from coaches whose work I admire — from Mike Gray at Gardiner, from Todd MacArthur at Winthrop, from Pete McLaughlin when he was at Messalonskee, from Nick Winchester at Hampden Academy — and they are always the truth.

 

We all love a good underdog story. Lord knows I do — given movies like “Seabiscuit” and “Rocky” have already dotted this Top 10 list, it should be obvious. The Hickory story reminds us all of the time Butler University (where the state championship game in “Hoosiers” was filmed) made a run to the NCAA Final Four, or the time a .500 team in the regular season pulled off an upset or two to reach the late rounds of the regional tournament at the Augusta Civic Center, or of the incredible runs little Valley had as one of the best teams in the state of Maine in the 1990s, regardless of class.

Those Cinderella stories aren’t just the Cinderella stories of the team, they are the stories of the communities at large, too. They are the people who find something other than the day-to-day doldrums of their working-class, same-as-last-week same-as-last-year lifestyles.

When the next generation succeeds, it’s an offer of hope to all of us that our tiny little school in our tiny little town in our tiny little state is finally going to put us all on the map.

It’s what the Hickory team did for Hickory in “Hoosiers.”

Basketball is a game, but in moments all over the place, it’s so much more than that. A win over a rival on a bitterly cold January night salves the soul, and a tournament victory is the elixir we crave until the anxiety of dreading over the next round’s opponent begins creeping in just 24 hours later.

We all wish that sports came with perspective. We all wish athletic accomplishment evened out on some level with academic achievement or works of charity in our social circles. It never quite seems to.

We are intoxicated by sports, by games, by outcomes, by star performances, by wins and losses. The smaller the town, it’s likely the greater the impact a game of basketball can have.

As Fleener reminds us before a particularly contentious vote to remove Dale from Hickory’s head coaching position midway through the season, “I think it goes a lot deeper than one game, don’t you?”

When it comes to high school basketball in small towns all across America, the answer is always “Yes.”

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