The National Collegiate Athletic Association will present its Final Four this weekend in a domed stadium in New Orleans too spacious for the intimate exercise of basketball and yet too small for the size of the event. From a regional sport with a national name, college basketball has grown into a national game with a regional flavor, the most consistently satisfying championship on the calendar. It has become a spectacle on the order of the Kentucky Derby, in the sense that the aficionados constitute the minority of the spectators. There cannot be this many basketball nuts.
Born in 1939 as an...