The other night I sat in the bandbox gym at Elba Central watching the girls play Notre Dame in the fiercest rivalry in local high-school basketball. The catercornered student sections traded taunts, not the hoary “We got spirit/Yes we do/We got spirit/How ‘bout you?” but the terser “We Can’t Hear You!” and, from Elba, the buoyantly populist “Sit Down, Rich Kids!”

You can bet that nearly every player on the floor has seen—and seen herself in—Hoosiers (1986), which is generally regarded as the best sports movie ever made and which is, withal, a deeply moving film about the centrality of a locally controlled school to a small town.

Hoosiers grew from the great mythic event in Indiana sports history: the 1954 state basketball championship won by the team from little Milan, which defeated Muncie in the title game, 32–30, on a last-second shot by its star player, the exquisitely named Bobby Plump. Indiana’s tournament was open to all schools, regardless of size. Country boys, city boys, two-room academies and concrete blocks in the asphalt jungle: everyone competed in the same division.

Indiana schoolboys were raised on folkloric tales of mighty Milan. A couple of years ago I traveled, for the American Enterprise, to the land of James Dean and James Whitcomb Riley to speak with one such Hoosier lad: Angelo Pizzo, the Bloomington native who wrote and coproduced Hoosiers and thereby apotheosized Milan (as “Hickory” in the movie) for the rest of us.

Pizzo and his college roommate, fellow Indianan David Anspaugh, had talked of making a movie “about the meaning of basketball to people in Indiana.” The daydream started to take shape when Pizzo, home for Christmas from USC film school, dropped by a high school game at Bloomington South. “The energy in that place—it would blow away any rock concert,” he recalled. “You have these guys in overalls, normally monosyllabic people, out of their seats, off the ground. I was just watching those people, feeling the energy, and I thought if I could ever capture this on film it would be special. Of course the state myth is Milan winning the championship so that’s what I gravitated toward.”

His early research was unpromising. “The essence of all drama is conflict. I went to interview the original [Milan] guys, and I said to the first person, ‘Were there any problems, any adversities?’ ‘Nope, everybody got along real good.’ I said, ‘You didn’t have one troublemaker?’ ‘Well, Bobby Plump used to show up late. Coach made him run laps.’ I knew I didn’t have a movie.”

So Pizzo drew from his own Indiana boyhood. “I got in my mind five high-school buddies and I gave them form and voice.”

The coach of Milan, Marvin Wood, was just 26 years old during that championship season. “I wrote it that way and the movie didn’t work. If he had failed, he still had the rest of his life.” Inspired by Horton Foote’s Tender Mercies, with Robert Duvall’s memorable performance, “I went back and made the character older, a guy with a last chance.”

Consider the lineup that turned down Hoosiers. Robert Duvall passed on the role of the coach, Norman Dale, which went to Gene Hackman. The part of Shooter, the redeemable alcoholic ex-jock played by Dennis Hopper, was rejected by Harry Dean Stanton. John Mellencamp was asked to write the score, but according to Pizzo he thought “those guys don’t know anything about basketball.”

Coach Dale, a volatile man getting a second chance in a movie about second chances, is based in part on Indiana University’s legendary Bobby Knight. Pizzo said, “I wondered what would happen if Knight punched a player”—as the Hackman character had done. “I utilized Knight’s offensive philosophy: four passes before a shot. I also created an arc for him where he actually listened to a player.” (This last touch, admittedly, borders on science fiction.)