THE BELL CURVE:

Whenever I think back over the years I’ve hung out on this planet, three events always come first to mind: the Great Depression, the second World War, and the annual Indiana state high school basketball tournament. Not necessarily in that order. Basketball might well edge out the Great Depression.

I thought a lot about that during my week off from this column, especially around 8:30 last Saturday night when I was pretty certain that the UC Irvine basketball team was not going to be celebrating its first trip ever to the Big Dance. And an hour later when I knew they wouldn’t. And a half hour after that while I watched an eruption of orange shirts from the stands at the Anaheim Convention Center enveloping the Cal State Fullerton players who would be going.

This sort of eruption was routine in my Indiana high school basketball days, but I had never seen it before in these sophisticated parts. It took me back to 1938 when South Side of Fort Wayne — my alma mater — became the first large city school to win the state high school championship. Before that, it had always been carried off by five guys who had grown up playing basketball together in small county seat towns like Milan, which was inspiration for the film “Hoosiers.”

It really happened just about the way it was told in that movie. I know because I was around Indiana when it happened.

I think that tournament had a lot to do with shaping those of us who lived there during our formative years. Unlike most other states — including California — the tournament was not played in classes according to the size of the high schools competing, the population of the town, or the connection with any non-public base. We were all thrown into the same pot — the big rich schools and the consolidated schools for farm kids. Concessions for the little schools were neither sought nor given, and never a year went by that several of them didn’t blindside big guys. Nor was there a losers’ bracket. One loss, and you were out. And we learned early to apply these same rules to life.

That’s the way it was last week at the Anaheim Convention Center, and I was there until UCI was finally knocked out by Fullerton in the title game. To get there, UCI had to play four nights in a row because of a seeding system too convoluted to explain here. And although they refused to use it as an excuse, the UCI players ran out of gas when they needed it most — which is not to take anything away from Fullerton and a wraith of a kid with the unlikely name of Josh Akognon who throws the ball up from any place he happens to find himself on the floor. It doesn’t matter if he’s off balance or on the dead run, he gets nothing but net.

I invested my Indiana folklore in UCI basketball when I began teaching there soon after the campus opened, and I’m still waiting for their first trip to March Madness. Some years ago, in a moment of similar desperation, I promised not to depart this vale until the Anaheim Angels won a World Series. It seemed a safe bet at the time, but they crossed me up in 2002, and I’ve been looking over my shoulder ever since. But now I’m prepared to make the same pledge to UCI basketball and the fulfillment of its quest for a dance card at the big tournament.

I’ve been told that Indiana has instituted classes in its high school tournament, and I hope it isn’t so.

That would be a high order of regression. I’ll be remembering the way it was when I settle in on Thursday night to watch Fullerton upset highly favored Wisconsin. As for UCI, well, maybe next year.

Amid a growing sense of panic over the state of our economy, it is something of a relief to contemplate a smaller crisis that probably affects almost as many people but sticks it to us more at the irritating level of a hangnail than the disintegrating value of our homes. That would be the growing threat to jack up the price of popcorn — already badly overpriced — in our local movie houses.

The popcorn crisis was reportedly a major cause of concern at the recent annual convention of the National Assn. of Theater Owners. It seems that popcorn carries declining ticket sales on its back, and since attendance continues to fall with the economy, it is easier to bridge the gap with increased popcorn revenue than higher ticket prices.

The chief executive of Regal Entertainment Group, Mike Campbell, told a Los Angeles Times reporter that “if we didn’t charge as much for concessions as we do, tickets to the movies would cost $20.” Which hits me as a colossal case of the tail wagging the dog.

Remarkably, much of this is being blamed — with a tortured line of reasoning — on global warming. It goes like this. Because global warming has made us hyper-conscious of the need to develop alternate fuels to cut back on the carbons we spew into the atmosphere, farmers can enjoy much greater profits by replacing acres of popcorn with crops that can be converted into ethanol and other biofuels. So even though it still costs only a few cents to produce a $5 bag of popcorn, less popcorn being grown means higher prices — and a heavier economic load popcorn has to bear.

If you aren’t following this, let’s keep it simple.

Rather than raising the price of $5 popcorn, Regal can accomplish the same results by introducing a $3 bag with less than half as much popcorn but a great deal more appeal because it offers a better fit with the popcorn capacity of those of us who throw away a substantial amount of the $5 bag because it’s more than we can eat and the smallest we can buy.

The $3 bag should work until popcorn is once again in such short supply that it becomes more profitable to raise than ethanol corn. Then we’re back on the track to global warming. And, perhaps, better still, to making it an act of patriotism to buy the new $10 “small” bag.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.