Believe the hype, baby.

Dick Vitale was right. College basketball is awesome with a capital A,’ once again, even if his hypercaffeinated, speak-no-evil soliloquies are aggravating and annoying, in all caps with bold type.

Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League can only sacrifice steroids and Sudafed at the altar of A.C. Nielsen and pray that maybe, just maybe, they’ll enjoy a revival rivaling what’s afoot in NCAA men’s hoop.

Good luck with that. If those two organizations ever successfully rearrange the chairs on their sinking ships, there’ll be a mullet on Dickie V’s dome before they cook up the simultaneous excellence and sense of urgency we saw this past weekend.

Does anyone remember the college game from the 1980s, the one that made ESPN the greatest invention since one of Dr. James Naismith’s lackeys cut out the bottom of the peach baskets?

It’s back. I can’t be certain when it happened, having quit watching more than five consecutive minutes of regular-season games eons ago.

But if you don’t believe that the game once gutted by the lure of NBA lucre and the fundamentally bankrupt play of the Look At Me Generation has been restored to its rightful glory, well, you spent way too much time watching golf rain delays on Saturday and Sunday.

Those of us without lives were treated to the most frenetic foursome of regional finals, ever.

The entertainment value was better, still, if your chances of treading water in any pool went into the filter with Syracuse, Connecticut and Wake Forest last weekend. If there wasn’t a bracket holding you back, your loyalty to one team had less staying power than a J.Lo marriage.

You were just rooting for the games to go on. And on. And on.

Hard to believe March Madness has recovered like this. It went out like a lamb in the mid-to-late-1990s, when the NCAA devolved into a talent-starved, glorified developmental league for The Association.

For every Kobe Bryant, there’s a Korleone Young. For each Kevin Garnett, a Kwame Brown. Dozens of starry-eyed 17-year-olds would have been well served by two or three or (gasp) four years in the Big Ten or ACC but chose the instant gratification, instead.

Other players put in their obligatory season in the college hoop circus as if it were some sort of advanced placement phys-ed course. And the game’s image suffered badly.

Then a funny thing happened. The NBA draft became such a crowded meat market of prep school and European talent that doing basketball business the old-fashioned way suddenly wasn’t a bad alternative. Top 25 programs rediscovered the joy of suiting up juniors and seniors.

Rick Pitino returned through the back door after concluding that coaching guys who wanted to be there was preferable to coaching well-financed wannabes. Showing that they were paying attention and proving they weren’t fools, Mike Krzyzewski and Tom Izzo each rebuffed multiple offers from the pros.

Its talent base rebuilt from bench to baseline, the NCAA gave us greatness and dazzled us with drama over the weekend.

You could go a lifetime without watching a team rally from a 15-point deficit in the final four minutes of regulation or battle back from 20 down against a team that drained 18 3-pointers. Illinois and Louisville gave us both no-way, no-how experiences in one wild Saturday night.

Thirty-nine years had passed since the last regional final settled by double-overtime. Thank you very much, Michigan State and Kentucky.

And let’s not forget North Carolina, the program that’s the poster child for this resurgence. If this were 1999, the collective backside of Sean May, Rashad McCants, Raymond Felton and Marvin Williams might be gathering splinters in the NBA. The open market’s loss is our gain.

So soak up every second of the Final Four. Just make sure you pop in those earplugs first.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is [email protected].