State Is Indy-structible

Get up! Get up! Get up!

A house full of Michigan State fans stretched and peered over Michigan State trainers, who stretched and peered over Mateen Cleaves.

The Spartan senior leader had just landed sideways on his right ankle after soaring out of bounds, and an entire season was writhing in pain.

“I think I broke it!” Cleaves shouted.

“Oh [bleep!]” Coach Tim Izzo shouted.

Cleaves’ team was leading Florida by six points Monday night in college basketball’s national championship game, but remaining was still most of the second half.

A lifetime. A death watch.

If Cleaves was done, the Spartans were done. Against the frantic Florida defense, without their oxygen-tank sized point guard, they would have no breath.

Get up! Get up! Get up!

Cleaves winced. We winced.

Then he rose.

And all that is right about his sport, all that has been twisted and torn in these past few months, rose with him.

To the trainer’s room for tape.

To the scorer’s table for a standing ovation.

To the court where he limped and hopped and led the Spartans to an 89-76 victory,

And, finally, to his one shining moment.

It happened not during one of his soaring layups in the first half, or hobbling passes in the end.

It happened on crutches.

It happened long after the game, in the middle of the RCA Dome court, while Cleaves watched CBS’ annual postgame “Shining Moment” music video on the giant scoreboard.

Weeping uncontrollably.

Izzo hugged him. His parents, Herb and Frances, hugged him. He couldn’t stop crying.

“Remember when we used to sit in front of the TV and watch this?” Herb said.

Cleaves remembered. And now it was his face he was watching, his leadership, his moment.

“Unbelievable,” he said.

“My baby, my baby, my baby,” Frances said.

Mateen Cleaves walks, and college basketball lives.

On a dramatic night in the middle of a state still filled with little boys shooting scuffed balls at old barns, the right thing happened in the best way possible.

From the muck of a season of suspensions and suspicions appeared these shining truths:

There are still good college basketball players who ignore the NBA and avoid the agents long enough to stay in school until they are seniors.

There is still a chance that three of those players can play for the same team.

A team like that can still grow until finally it is in a position to make those seniors’ last year their best year.

That team can then squeeze out every ounce of its experience to fight off a younger group of hustling former high school all-stars to win a national championship.

It can still happen. College basketball can still work as it was intended.

“This is why we all came back,” said Spartan Morris Peterson, one of the three starring seniors along with A.J. Granger and Cleaves.

He tugged at the nylon strings around his neck, looking glassy-eyed into the sky.

“I’ve always dreamed about this,” he said. “But it’s even better than I could dream.”

This is why plenty of college basketball fans will also come back now, after Monday, to the sport which showed again how it can bleed drama and emotion like no other.

“Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh,” Cleaves kept saying again and again.

The same thing could be heard constantly throughout the crowd of 43,116 during a game unlike any other in the general dullness of the past three weeks.

Michigan State took the floor early and orderly. Florida jogged out late, with shoestrings flapping and shirts untucked.

Florida began with its full-court press. Michigan State broke through for layup attempts six times in its first 14 possessions.

Michigan State blanketed the perimeter and gave Florida the inside. Florida took and pounded layup after layup.

It was speed against brains, athleticism against experience, new against old.

Michigan State led quickly by six, then Florida closed it to two, then Michigan State suddenly led by 13, then Florida closed it to seven.

They were just getting started.

Timeouts were called and exhausted game officials chugged entire glasses of water. Fans keeping score continually lost their place.

Weary players started shoving each other, but Michigan State pushed hardest, and seemed in control when it led by six points with 16:18 remaining and then. . .

Cleaves happened.

He soared of bounds while trying to shove off Florida’s Teddy Dupay. The video replays of his ankle were uglier than the Wisconsin offense.

“I saw him laying there, and I thought it was really bad, that he wasn’t coming back,” said teammate Mike Chappell, who replaced him.

Before Chappell reached the court, though, Izzo called his team together and reminded them that they had won without Cleaves before.

“I told them, ‘We went 13 [games] without him, we could do it for a second half,” Izzo said.

But he didn’t believe it. And even though the Spartans outscored the Gators, 8-5, while he was gone, they had committed two turnovers during those four-and-a-half minutes and were unwinding fast.

“Mateen is our leader, our warrior, we needed him,” Peterson said.

The moment Cleaves realized he could walk, his team had him back.

“They would have to amputate my leg to keep me out of there,” he said. “This was my last chance. No way was anybody going to take it away from me.”

And so nobody did. Within a moment of his return, he threw a long pass to Peterson for an assist.

He spent the rest of the game making similar one-footed passes, hobbling stops, lunging swats.

Then finally, with 23 seconds left, he turned to the crowd and danced, one-footed and marvelous, a celebration of a four-word phrase that was lost but has been found.

The old college try.

He does not dance alone.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.