THE BELL CURVE:

I’ll be in the Anaheim Convention Center on Wednesday night watching UCI play UC Davis in what is as close as Newport-Mesa will probably ever get to March Madness.

Watching UCI basketball has become an almost religious rite for me since 1966 when I went to work in the English Department at UCI. There were high hopes in those early years under Coach Bill Mulligan that have deteriorated steadily over the intervening years as the Anteaters have become the Chicago Cubs of college basketball.

They come to rush week every year, but they have yet to be invited to the big show. Fielding a high-level college basketball team depends almost totally on how effectively a school recruits outstanding high school players.

UCI has always faced two obstacles that have worsened with time. First, there are the high academic standards that turn away prospects who look on studies more as an irritation than an opportunity. And, second, the lack of national visibility in the UCI program doesn’t sit well with players who are looking to big money in the pros.

For someone like me from the Midwest, where real estate doesn’t sell unless there is a basket on the garage and schools are built around the gymnasium, we take our basketball wherever we can find it, and UCI is the only show in town that leads to March Madness.

So we go. And sometimes — like partisans of the visiting teams — we outnumber the UCI students in the stands, which is hard to comprehend for an Indiana boy who never saw an empty seat at a basketball game until he moved west.

The notable exception to this picture has, of course, been the program of UCLA’s John Wooden who was born, raised, played and first coached in Indiana.

My high school — South Side of Fort Wayne — won the state championship in my senior year, the first time that prize went to one of Indiana’s half-dozen larger cities.

I wasn’t able to make the team, but I shared the celebration that surpassed the one that took place seven years later when we won World War II. We had our priorities in place.

The focus of all this joy was, and continues to be, the tournament. I don’t know if it was created in Indiana or we just refined it, but it has served as a role model for the March Madness that starts next week when 64 college teams will begin the fratricide that will reduce the competitors left standing to 16 by the end of the week.

UCI is a member of the Big West conference, which sends the winner of its tournament to the big show. Only once has that team progressed beyond the sweet 16. That happened many years ago when Cal State Fullerton — known deprecatingly among the tournament elite as “Cal State who?” — came within an agonizingly last second field goal of making it to the Final Four. That achievement still stands as a watermark for the Big West conference.

Why do tournaments hold such a grip on us?

Two things in particular occur to me. First is the finality of tournaments. When you lose, you’re out — and in jousting times, possibly dead. No second chance until next year. Or maybe ever. There’s a wonderful clarity about this.

And, second, it gives the little guy a chance to whack the big guy on a level playing field.

That was one of the beauties of the Indiana high school tournament.

There were no classes. The rural high schools — where sometimes the basketball team represented half the male student body — went head-to-head with large inner city schools.

That was the genesis of the movie “Hoosiers,” a true story about five farm kids who grew up shooting baskets together and ended up state champions.

There are relatively few opportunities in our culture for the underdog to turn the tables on the elite. And when the opportunity arises, so does the cheering section.

That’s why we’re captivated when the Valparaisos and Cal State whos and Davidsons upend the Dukes and UCLAs and Kansans.

That’s also why there is more support than envy for African-American kids from inner city ghettos who hold out for an extra million or two from billionaire owners of professional teams.

And it is also why I’ll be at the Anaheim Convention Center on Wednesday night, hoping UCI will still be alive on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. And miracle of miracles at the big show a week later.

March Madness is just over the hill, and the baseball season is right behind. And for the consumer of spectator sports, the last week in March may also be the last opportunity for a while — maybe for quite awhile — to find a temporary release from economic depression by leaving our stress for a few hours at a gymnasium or a ball park.

I can remember from the Depression of the 1930s how sports provided a glorious diversion from despair. Saving up 50 cents to sit in the bleachers at Comiskey Park in Chicago had enormous medicinal value.

So will watching UCI’s effort Wednesday night to mount the first rung of a ladder that leads to another run and another and eventually to a dream.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.