The Bell Curve:

I like to visit traveling road shows of military aircraft, always hoping to find one of the planes I flew in World War II.

When that happens — which is infrequent because Navy aircraft don’t get the kind of exposure that those old Army Air Force planes do — for me, it isn’t a love fest or a yearning for the wide blue yonder.

Mostly, it is the feeling of wonderment to be able to stand once again in front of a Douglas dive bomber, trying to recall how on Earth I got into the cockpit 60 years earlier.

I often go home after such visits and get out my flight logbook. It shows 1,741 hours of piloting Navy aircraft with a final entry logged Oct. 17, 1945.

The most recent visit to the logbook came last week when I checked out the Lyon Air Museum. It was the lifelong dream of a flyboy who became a general and found enough time beyond his duties as chief of the Air Force Reserve to build a fortune in California real estate.

Then Maj. Gen. William Lyon spent $10 million to share his hobby by building a home for his collection of military aircraft and inviting us in.

The seven vintage aircraft, all spiffed up and shining, on display there, are kept in flying condition and exercised every few months. They are attended by a team of volunteer docents — many of whom flew some of these planes under less peaceful conditions — to answer our questions. The docent on duty when I visited was Ray Silvius, who joined the Air Force when he was 19 in the waning years of World War II. He says the greatest joy in his museum duty is finding new listeners for sharing war stories.

The seven planes on display have war stories, too. Like the undersides of the wings of a B-17, for example, that were painted in black-and-white stripes so the troops on the ground on D-day would not fire on their own planes.

But in my recollection, the plane on exhibit with the greatest immediate impact on the folks back home — both in the U.S. and Japan — was the B-25 light bomber. If I was taking kids through the museum, that’s the story I would tell them first.

I was still a civilian, awaiting a call-up in April 1942 when Col. Jimmy Doolittle, leading 16 B-25s carrying 80 airmen, took off for one-way flights to bomb Japan. The U.S. was at low ebb after taking body blows on land, on sea and in the air. Never had the homeland needed reassurance more.

So the B-25s made a precarious takeoff from a carrier not designed to take such a load and knowing that they probably didn’t have enough fuel to get to a safe landing on what could easily have been a suicide mission.

It wasn’t. All of the planes got off safely, made it to their targets and dropped their bombs. The bombs did little damage to the Japanese war machine but had an enormous effect in the U.S. Almost overnight I could feel the spirits of the whole country soaring. And the price on the American side wasn’t as severe as we had feared. Only 11 of the airmen were killed or captured, and 13 of the 16 aircraft got down in areas — mostly Chinese — under allied control.

At the Lyon Museum I didn’t find any of the planes that I flew. The closest I came to one was an ancient Douglas DC-3. It was the progenitor of the R5D transport plane in which I flew wounded servicemen back from Okinawa at the end of the war. And the memories it provoked were well worth the six bucks it cost for old guys like me.

As you read this, the first round of March Madness is underway. And as I write this, I don’t know if Orange County’s sole survivor might still be hanging on by one fingernail. That would be UC Irvine, which played Wednesday night, because they turned an 8-point deficit into a tie game with one minute to play, then pulled away in the overtime to live another day. Now all they have to do is win four games in a row in the Big West tournament to get a toe into the Big Show, which is about as likely as getting a straight answer from Manny Ramirez. But, like my brick at Anaheim Stadium says, the truly obsessed are “ever hopeful.”

I’ve been going to UCI basketball games for 25 years in the hope they would win the conference tournament and clinch an automatic invitation to the Final 64, but they haven’t come close. And this year they almost didn’t even make it into their own conference tournament. But however it plays out, I’ll be back next year. You can’t run a basketball game under the nose of a Hoosier without getting a response. Especially tournaments.

I’ve given some thought to why that is, and I’ve decided that it is one of the few places left where it is possible for the little guy to actually win it all against ridiculous odds. And when that happens, it gets turned into a movie like “Hoosiers.” It doesn’t happen often, but it’s out there to be had. I was living in Indiana when the tiny farming town of Milan, which served as the model for “Hoosiers,” won the state high school basketball championship.

Then there is also the matter of sudden death. There’s a lot of clarity in the knowledge that if you lose, you’re out. No losers bracket or two out of three or defined by age or experience. Just a conglomerate pile of people after the same reward. During my Midwestern years, that’s the way the tournament was run. Now I understand it is broken down by classes, and if true, that represents regression, not progress. The farmers from Milan no longer have the opportunity to stick it to Indianapolis or Ft. Wayne. But we can still write a best seller the first time out.

And the Big West tournament is still up for grabs.

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