Surely, 35 years haven’t gone by already.

Surely, it hasn’t been that long since Willie McCarter, Dolph Pulliam, Willie Wise, Don Draper, Gary Zeller and the guys from little ol’ Drake almost knocked off John Wooden’s powerhouse UCLA team in the NCAA Final Four.

Surely, the Willies and Don and Gary and Rick Wanamaker and Al Williams and the rest of the gang aren’t in their mid-50s already, are they?

I’m afraid so.

But let’s all be glad that most of them will be in Des Moines this weekend to be honored by Drake one more time.

Let’s pack the Knapp Center and let ‘em know we appreciate them for what they did in that magical 1968-69 basketball season.

I got a first-hand look at what Maury John, the Bulldogs’ coach, pulled off in a Missouri Valley Conference that then included such teams as Louisville, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Memphis State.

John wound up taking his final three Drake teams to the NCAA tournament. The 1968-69 team was clearly his best, but the next two came within a victory in the Midwest Regional of also going to the Final Four.

John combined some outstanding high school recruits with strong junior college talent to build a program at a sleepy little school in a tough Des Moines neighborhood into one of the best in the nation.

His teams played unbelievably strong defense, but they could also run and they could also score. They weren’t big, but they could jump. They took on all comers—Wooden and UCLA included.

They stunned the nation by taking the Bruins to the wire on the opening night of the Final Four at Freedom Hall in Louisville. UCLA finally won, 85-82, but Wooden knew he’d been in a tremendous struggle.

They still played third-place games in the Final Four in those days, and Drake took on another of college basketball’s big boys in that one.

All the Bulldogs did in the consolation game was thoroughly wipe out Dean Smith’s North Carolina team, 104-84.

I have some thoughts about that. I think Drake’s hierarchy in the years that immediately followed the John era were bothered by the fact that John left the Bulldogs’ program and took the coaching job at Iowa State when Hilton Coliseum opened.

Some at Drake never forgave John for that move. Well, hell, I didn’t like it either that John left the place where he had made his mark. But time eventually healed the sore spots.

I’m just glad that Tom Davis, Drake’s savvy first-year coach, and Dave Blank, the Bulldogs’ athletic director, have made the 35-year reunion possible. It’s long overdue.

Maury John was as kind a man—yet as tough a man when a game was on the line—as anyone I’ve ever seen in coaching. He was a winner in basketball and in life.

His life ended much too quickly after taking the Iowa State job. Cancer of the esophagus was the cause. I couldn’t believe it that day on the telephone when John said those words to me, "I’ve got inoperable cancer."

I wish Maury John could be at the Knapp Center on Saturday. I wish the late Gus Guydon—who had been a standout player at Drake and later was an assistant on the 1968-69 team--could be there, too.

A lot of us will be thinking of them.

Coach Steve Alford is riding on thin ice with lots of Hawkeye fans, and didn’t help himself with last night’s loss at Northern Iowa.

One fan e-mailed me today, saying that an Iowa loss to UNI is "completely unacceptable. Alford just isn’t doing the job. How can they expect to win a Big Ten road game when they can’t win at UNI?"

"I try to follow the Drake women’s basketball team, but that is hard to do when you have to rely on the local excuse for a newspaper.

"I’ve been trying to find out whatever happened to Maureen Head. She was a starter for two years and started the early games this season. Then she lost her starting job and did not play much.

"She only played about 5 minutes against Minnesota on Nov. 25 and her name was not in the box score when Drake played at Dayton on Nov. 29.

"I don’t know if she made the trip to Dayton or not, but she was nowhere to be seen at the game against Michigan on Friday night—not in uniform and not in street clothes on the bench.

"I assume she is either injured, sick, suspended, kicked off the team or quit, but you would never know reading the Register. If anybody you talk to knows what happened, would you pass it along.

"Also, did you ever think you would see the day when the Iowa and Iowa State men’s teams and the Drake women’s team won home games and the Iowa women’s team won a road game on the same night—and none of the games made the front page of the sports section?"

[NOTE: I e-mailed Mary Ann Tierney, Drake’s women’s sports information director, and asked her about Maureen Head. Mary Ann’s reply: "She was on the bench for the Michigan game in street clothes. She’s out with some medical conditions right now."

Said Appleby in a later e-mail: "I must have missed her at the Michigan game, but I saw her there today (at the game against Maine).]