Rarely does a single game transform an entire sport. Super Bowl III had that effect on professional football, when Joe Namath’s underdog New York Jets defeated the vaunted Baltimore Colts. In his new book, When March Went Mad, sports journalist Seth Davis examines the “catalytic event” that changed modern basketball: the 1979 NCAA title game, which “helped to catapult college basketball, and especially the NCAA tournament, into the national consciousness.”

Today, “March Madness” is an American institution. Every year, millions of us participate in office pools, regardless of how much (or how little) we know or care about college hoops. President Obama’s 2009 NCAA tournament bracket is posted on the White House website. Obama correctly picked the champion, the North Carolina Tar Heels, who on Monday night easily dispatched the Michigan State Spartans by a score of 89–72.

Thirty years ago in Salt Lake City, a different Michigan State squad played for the NCAA crown. Its best player would go on to become a basketball legend. The Spartans’ opponent in that championship game, the Indiana State Sycamores, also boasted a future NBA superstar. The hype surrounding this contest — and these two players — was enormous. Indeed, before Michigan State’s Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Indiana State’s Larry Bird created the NBA’s most ferocious rivalry, they were the central attractions in an NCAA final that drew unprecedented television ratings, “kicked off a six-year stretch that could fairly be characterized as the golden era of the NCAA tournament,” and signaled the coming renaissance of professional basketball.

Davis, a CBS Sports analyst and writer for Sports Illustrated, offers a fascinating portrait of the two players — their backgrounds, their personalities, and the immense pressures generated by their celebrity status. “For all of their similarities,” he writes, “these two guys could not have been more different.” Magic soaked up media attention and possessed an infectious charm. (“As long as you got the questions, I got the answers,” he told reporters at a press conference before the 1979 championship game.) Bird hated talking to the press and came across as aloof. Magic was an African-American city kid from Lansing, Mich. Bird was a white farm boy from rural Indiana.

Their respective teams were a study in contrasts, as well. Michigan State seesawed through an uneven 1978–79 season that included six defeats, including a “humiliating” 83–65 loss to Northwestern. But it also played in a top-tier conference (the powerful Big Ten) and was heavily favored against Indiana State. Heading into the 1979 title game, the Sycamores had compiled a stunning 33–0 record, yet skeptics pointed to their relatively weak competition in the lowly Missouri Valley Conference. Malcolm Moran of the New York Times called them “the most unknown undefeated team in the country.” Davis says that Indiana State would have been “the most unlikely NCAA champion in history.”

Hyped beyond all measure, the game turned out to be disappointing. “It wasn’t particularly well played — it certainly wasn’t well officiated — and though it was competitive for most of the second half, it did not end in dramatic fashion,” writes Davis. Bird “turned in by far his worst performance of the season,” committing six turnovers, dishing out only two assists (his lowest total all year), and shooting 33 percent from the field. The Spartans won by 11 points, 75–64.

Though it may have been anticlimactic, the game proved a ratings bonanza for NBC. “Nielsen Media Research reported that the contest had generated a 24.1 rating, which meant that nearly a quarter of all television sets in America were tuned in that night,” Davis writes. “Thirty years later, that remains the highest Nielsen rating for any basketball game, college or pro, in the history of the sport.”

By boosting interest in college basketball, the Magic-Bird game helped fuel a sharp rise in the NCAA tournament’s TV revenues. As Davis points out, it occurred “at a most propitious moment,” when cable TV was first emerging. ESPN launched in September 1979. The all-sports cable channel “grew largely on the basis of its college basketball programming, getting particularly good notices when it showed the early round games of the 1980 NCAA tournament.” By 1983, the New York Times was describing the NCAA tourney as “perhaps the fastest-growing sports event in the country.”

This was indeed a “golden era” for the tournament. Many had warned that the end of John Wooden’s UCLA dynasty in the mid-1970s would severely diminish the popularity of college basketball. Magic and Bird solved that problem. In the six years after 1979, the NCAA tournament showcased the talents of Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, and other future NBA icons. The period from 1979 to 1985 “also included two of the greatest championship-game upsets in sports history: North Carolina State over Houston in 1983 and Villanova over Georgetown in 1985,” Davis writes.

There have certainly been memorable tournament moments since then, such as Christian Laettner’s buzzer-beater in the 1992 East Regional final, Chris Webber’s timeout call (made when his Michigan team was out of timeouts) in the 1993 national-championship game, and the game-tying three-pointer drained by Kansas guard Mario Chalmers in the closing seconds of regulation in the 2008 title contest. (Kansas went on to win in overtime.) But whereas Magic, Bird, and Jordan all had illustrious college careers before going pro, neither of today’s two leading NBA superstars — Kobe Bryant and LeBron James — went to college. Neither did Kevin Garnett, star of the defending-champion Boston Celtics.

Compared to today’s environment, the college-basketball world of March 1979 seems almost quaint. National-television exposure was minimal during the regular season. “There was no televised ‘Selection Show’” to announce the NCAA tournament bracket, Davis notes. The game itself was different, too: There was no three-point line and no shot clock. (Those features would be added in the mid-1980s as part of an effort to increase scoring and improve the pace of games.)

Meanwhile, “the NBA was in the midst of a terrible season beset by sagging attendance, plummeting TV ratings, and the growing perception that white America would never buy in to a sport dominated by black players.” That perception changed in the 1980s, when Magic and Bird propelled two of the NBA’s most famous teams to a combined eight league championships. The Magic-led Los Angeles Lakers won five NBA crowns during the Eighties (in 1980, 1982, 1985, 1987, and 1988) while the Bird-led Boston Celtics won three (in 1981, 1984, and 1986). The Magic-Bird rivalry ignited a furious Lakers-Celtics rivalry that elevated the NBA to new heights of popularity. Magic and Bird met three times in the NBA Finals, with Boston winning in 1984 and Los Angeles triumphing in 1985 and 1987.

“Not only were they great players, but they went to two of our most storied franchises,” NBA commissioner David Stern told Davis. “They played off each other so well. You had the ‘Showtime’ of the Lakers versus the lunch pail brigade. If the NBA had gone out of business or had stayed at the same level it was at, [the 1979 final] would not have been the iconic game it turned out to be. But as you looked back, it became a milestone, the starting point for all the things that were converging on our sport.”

There’s no denying the impact of the Magic-Bird showdown on college basketball in general and the NCAA tournament in particular. Davis cites a remark by the late Al McGuire, a former NBA player and college coach who was part of the broadcasting team that called the 1979 final for NBC. “The college game was already on the launching pad,” McGuire told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “Then Bird and Magic came along and pushed the button.”

– Duncan Currie is deputy managing editor of National Review Online.