The real Jimmy Chitwood

This is why social media is awesome.

The Indiana High School Athletic Association posted the final minutes of the 1954 Indiana State Championship basketball game, played between Milan and Muncie Central. The Milan team was the inspiration for the greatest sports movie ever made, Hoosiers.

Soon after it was posted by the IHSAA, sports writers and personalities alike began tweeting about its existence on the web, and now, we all have the wonderful privilege of watching the grainy footage of the most exciting and famous 32-30 basketball game ever played.

For those that aren't aware, the story goes like this: until 1997, Indiana did not have divisions in high school basketball come tournament time, so what resulted was a single-class state tournament. As in, every single team in the state was playing for the same title. That meant good teams from rural areas usually had plenty of opportunity to win several games over the lesser teams from their sectionals and districts, but would inevitably lose later in the tournament when they ran into the teams from big schools in urban areas like Indianapolis, Muncie or South Bend.

That is, until Milan High School, with its enrollment of 161 students, denied powerhouse Muncie Central its fifth state championship with a defensive, slow-it-down slugfest in the 1954 title game. On a Bobby Plump buzzer-beater, Milan took the title 32-30 and went down in Indiana basketball lore.

If you know Hoosiers (and if you don't, stop reading this, go to the library, and rent it. If it's not at the library, here you go), you know the rest. Coach Marvin Wood ages several years and turns into Gene Hackman. Maris Valainis, after not even playing high school basketball, is selected to play Jimmy Chitwood, the Bobby Plump character of the movie, and actually turned out to be an incredible shooter (this scene was filmed in one take. Also, sorry about the italian. Unbelievably, this is the only version of this clip I could find anywhere on the internet).

At any rate, as awesome as Hoosiers is, it's even cooler to see what happened in real life. Movies almost always inject drama into their true stories to keep the audience riveted. In the case of that final game, no extra drama was needed. Bobby Plump hit a buzzer beater, just like Jimmy Chitwood did.