Bedlam: Cowboys and Sooners need a moment

Bedlam basketball has returned to relevancy.

Finally.

These past few years have been boredom when it comes to Bedlam. No sizzle. No hype. Sure, any time Oklahoma and Oklahoma State meet for an athletic competition, there’s a little added juice. But for most fans, there hasn’t been much excitement about the men’s basketball games these past few years. Neither team has been good enough to take the games to another level.

That changes Saturday.

OSU and OU are both NCAA Tournament-caliber teams. Whether they both make the field remains to be seen, but they’re at least in the hunt.

That changes the vibe.

Know what else would change the tenor of this rivalry?

A moment.

There have been so many great moments in Bedlam basketball history over the years. Just in the past few decades you can count David Little’s last-second shot that beat OSU in Stillwater in 1983, Victor Williams’ buzzer-beater (or was the shot clock expired?) that beat OU in Stillwater in 2003 and Byron Eaton’s foul on Terrell Everett (or was it really a foul?) right before the buzzer that allowed OU to escape in Norman in 2006. And who can forget OU beating OSU in 2000 in what was the final game in pre-renovation, pre-expansion Gallagher-Iba Arena? Or the night that the Sooners wore orange T-shirts to honor the Cowboys and the 10 men lost in the plane crash?

And then there was the craziest Bedlam of them all — the game between the Cowboys and the Sooners at the 2009 Big 12 Tournament in Oklahoma City.

I was across the street that night from what was then the Ford Center covering the Big 12 women’s tournament at the Cox Convention Center, but I could almost feel the ground shake. It happened that the arena was split nearly evenly between Cowboy and Sooner fans, so no matter what happened, the arena would be buzzing. The Sooners would make a play, and the crimson-clad fans would go berserk while the orange-clad ones fell silent. But then the Cowboys would make a play, and the OU fans would pipe down and the OSU fans would crank up.

The noise was constant, and the volume was loud.

“I remember it being split in half, orange and red,” Cowboy coach Travis Ford said. “I remember it being a tremendous atmosphere.