St. Paul native Jack McCartan helped the United States win a gold medal at the 1960 Winter Olympics. Back then hockey was much more of a niche sport around the state compared to basketball, but some six decades later it appears as though hockey has become more vital to Minnesota than ever. (Marty Lederhandler, Associated Press/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

There wasn't much of a basketball/hockey rivalry for capturing the hearts and minds of Minnesota's sporting public until the late 1960s. Basketball was played from border to border, from hundreds of hamlets with Crackerbox gyms to the Williams Arena airport hangar holding 18,000 fans, one-third of whom might be smoking.

Someone screams "Fire!" — what the heck, we all could've gotten out of there in 30, 40 minutes if it was close to full.

Hockey was played in the Twin Cities and "Up North," although not in Bemidji, where coach Bun Fortier was famous statewide for his fiercely competitive basketball teams.

Theone-class basketball state tournament (only boys, of course) filled Williams Arena in late March, while the hockey tournament was played a month earlier in the half-sized St. Paul Auditorium with basically eight of same 15-20 teams every year.

Then, in 1967, the North Stars arrived to occupy the rapidly constructed Met Center as an NHL expansion team, and from the slowly expanding suburbs west and south, and from Duluth and the Range, and from the East Side of St. Paul, and, by golly, even from Rochester, came the hockey hungry to fill the place.

Meanwhile, there was also a basketball team in the new ABA, the Muskies, and they attained such popularity that Jim Klobuchar wrote in the Minneapolis Star that when he called the team's ticket office to ask what time the game started, he was asked in return, "When can you get here?"

Two years later, in March 1969, came the move of the hockey tournament to Met Center — and the Warroad vs. Edina, "Henry Boucha getting hammered into the boards" final on the roaring, screaming, unforgettable Saturday night substantially flipped the high school winter sports scene.

Bill Musselman, and then Jim Dutcher, and finally Clem Haskins did much to create a Gophers basketball scene that made "the Barn" the liveliest athletic arena in town for numerous winters.

Then again, Howard Cosell never came to town for a Gophers basketball game. He did so for a hockey state tournament.

I've explained my preference for basketball thusly for decades:

"I grew up in southwest Minnesota. It might as well have been downstate Indiana. The only time we watched a hockey game was when the U.S. won the Olympic gold medal in 1960 — and mainly because the heroic goalie, Jack McCartan, had played third base for the Fulda Giants town team in 1956."

Now, Luverne, way down in our southwest corner, the feared, full court-pressing, crew cut Cardinals, the state one-class basketball champion in 1964 … it's a hockey town.

And Sherburn, another prairie town, was the last of the one-class champs in 1970 — well, the goalie for the United States' under-18 team that stopped 29 of 32 shots in its 3-2 loss to the Gophers on Thursday night at Mariucci was Carsen Musser from Sherburn.

At this moment, Bob Motzko has the most talented Gophers men's team since Don Lucia won the first of his back-to-back titles in 2002, and across the street, Ben Johnson's second Gophers men's basketball team has bordered on the unwatchable.

On TV. I haven't made the trek. I might weep at the sight of 3,500 people watching bad basketball. And making it worse for us dedicated Richard Pitino bashers: He's 13-0 and has New Mexico ranked No. 22 in his second season with the Lobos.

The favorable element for basketball back in October seemed to be on the pro front:

The Timberwolves appeared to have upgraded after losing a six-game playoff series in the NBA's first round. The Wild appeared to have downgraded after losing a six-game playoff series in the NHL's first round.

We hoop-heads have been foiled again. Tim Connelly, the new $8 million-a-year basketball boss, has the Wolves at the precipice for the franchise's greatest disaster, which is saying something.

And the Wild — Kevin Fiala's goals are gone and a guy named Sam Steel is centering the first line, but they have Kirill Kaprizov, and there's only one pro athlete around here to compare, and that's Justin Jefferson.

It's tough to do in hockey, but Kaprizov is a team carrier. The Wolves don't have one of those — not Anthony Edwards consistently, not Karl-Anthony Towns ever, and not Rudy Gobert, the ransom for the franchise's future.

This prairie boy finally has to admit it: basketball vs. hockey in a Minnesota winter … hockey wins, now more than ever.

Some outfit might even want to make a slogan out of that.