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Gordon Hayward makes Butler go

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Around Butler University these days, it’s hard to tell fact from fiction, real from what might have been dreamed.

After the Bulldogs men’s basketball team won the NCAA West Regional on Saturday, university President Bobby Fong was carried around on the shoulders of students and there was a campus rally at 2:30 in the morning when the team arrived home.

Matt Howard, the team’s center, was surprised to learn that his mustache now has its own Facebook page.

This is what happens when an underdog basketball team from Indiana starts knocking off heavy favorites. People get a little giddy and start wondering whether the kind of thing that inspired a movie could come around and happen again.

Since its second-round victory over top-seeded Syracuse, Butler has been tied to the story line from the 1986 movie “ Hoosiers” — that of a small-town Indiana high school team that wins the state’s coveted basketball championship.

The next chapter of Butler’s real-life story will be played out Saturday, when the Bulldogs meet Michigan State in a Final Four semifinal.

“Hoosiers” was loosely based on the 1954 team from Milan High that beat a school 10 times its size for the state title. The team in the movie is from Hickory, and its hero is Jimmy Chitwood, who wins the title with a last-second shot.

Playing the role for Butler is Gordon Hayward, a baby-faced sophomore forward from Brownsburg (population 20,000), which is about 18 miles northwest of Indianapolis, site of this year’s Final Four.

Hayward leads Butler with averages of 15.4 points and 8.2 rebounds but doesn’t have the look of a basketball headliner.

“The first time I ever saw him, he came walking into an open gym,” teammate Willie Veasley said. “Coach had told me he was a special player, but he just didn’t seem like anything, just this skinny 6-foot-9 kid.”

There was, however, a transformation.

“As soon as he touched the basketball,” Veasley said, “it was amazing.”

Against favored Kansas State on Saturday, Hayward broke a 54-54 tie with a contortionist’s bank shot after rearranging his flight plan in midair to snag an errant pass on what was supposed to be a lob-and-dunk play.

Asked about it during a postgame news conference, Hayward said earnestly: “Obviously, the coaches and teammates got me in position where I could do something with the ball.”

His humility was real.

Hayward calls to mind a like-bodied young man from Indiana from another era who led his mid-size Indiana university to college basketball’s biggest stage: Larry Bird, from French Lick, left Indiana University and took Indiana State to the 1979 NCAA title game.

Hayward, whose parents attended Purdue, chose Butler over becoming a Boilermaker.

“I didn’t know it was Division I,” he said of his choice. “Sometimes when something is right for you, there’s this feeling you get.”

He got that same feeling about basketball after growing 10 inches between his freshman and senior years in high school. To that point, he had been more of a tennis player.

But choosing Butler over the Big Ten Conference hadn’t hurt his reputation even before the Bulldogs’ recent tournament run. He spent last summer playing for the U.S. under-19 national team.

“I was as impressed with him as anybody that we’ve had with USA Basketball in the last eight years,” Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim said.

It was no surprise to Boeheim then, when Hayward scored 17 points to lead Butler over Syracuse, including nine points in a row after the Orange had taken a 40-39 lead early in the second half.

Two days later, Hayward scored 15 of his 22 points in the second half in a seven-point win over Kansas State and gained additional admirers.

Kansas State’s Frank Martin said he tried all he could think of to slow Hayward, but nothing worked.

“Guys who are 6-8, 6-9 that can drive to the basket the way he drives it and can shoot it, that’s a problem,” Martin said. “If you guard him small, he just takes you inside. If you guard him big, he drives the basketball.”

He showed he could play defense too. Curtis Kelly, who had 14 points in the first half for Kansas State, had two in the second half.

“Hayward was on me everywhere I turned,” Kelly said.

Hayward knows that feeling, of course, because everywhere he turns now are the comparisons to Bird and to “Hoosiers,” the stuff of which dreams are made.

When it comes to dreams, though, he says the Bulldogs have their own, and “ours didn’t stop at getting to the Final Four.”

chris.foster@latimes.com

twitter.com/cfosterlatimes

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