I just interviewed the best team in all of college basketball.

Ivan and Virginia Crawford were married on February 25, so they could spend their honeymoon in Tulsa at the NAIA tournament, cheering on their hometown team, Biola University of La Mirada, Calif.

Sitting in the last row of the lower section, decked out in matching red Biola Eagle warmup jackets, Ivan hands out homemade chocolate-chip cookies. Meanwhile, Virginia sips from a Gatorade bottle with a straw while taking the kind of meticulous game notes you'd expect from a coach.

A while back, when Ivan was struggling to cope with the death of his wife of 54 years, Virginia rang him up on the phone and said, "Ivan, I've been there, done that. Now come on over and have some breakfast with me."

They've been together ever since. For 45 years, Ivan and Virginia lived two blocks apart on Cedar Avenue, but barely knew each other. (This is all according to Virginia, because when I ask him to talk about his new wife and his new lease on life, Ivan breaks down and begins to sob.)

"Don't ever give up," he says, rubbing away tears, "don't ever give up, that's our motto." Judging by the way the small-college teams compete here -- diving for loose balls as if the court were made of grass and not wood -- it seems to be the NAIA's slogan as well.

Ivan and Virginia's first few dates were to Biola basketball games. And now, the 73-year-olds are inseparable. During timeouts, Virginia shows off her wedding pictures while resting her head gently on Ivan's shoulder. One afternoon during an earlier round, I couldn't find the Crawfords in the stands and started to panic. (I was hoping they'd adopt me as a grandchild or, at least, hook me up with some more of Virginia's cookies.) But an official from Biola, which lost in overtime in the second round to finalist USAO (University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma), told me the honeymooners had gone back to their hotel for a nap -- waving his fingers in the air to make quotations around the word "nap".

Ya know, if you measure a sporting event by the kind of fans it keeps, then the NAIA national tourney -- 32 teams playing 31 games over six days on one court here in Tulsa -- is as pure and powerful and proud as anything on the sports landscape.

Across the arena from the Crawfords is a couple that has been to 55 straight NAIA tournaments, through cancer and broken bones, through snowstorms and tornadoes. Think of the athletes they've seen: Dennis Rodman (who, while playing for Southeastern Oklahoma once poured in 46 points and grabbed 32 rebounds), Scottie Pippen, World B. Free, Willis Reed, M.L. Carr, Rick Mahorn and Earl Monroe. The NBA scouts in attendance this week are banking on that pipeline of talent continuing.

So what does it say about our sports culture when this arena isn't packed for every single one of these scrappy, well-coached, explosive contests? It tells me we tend to judge our sporting events for all the wrong reasons -- school size, players' names, shoe contracts, TV ratings, attendance -- when none of this has anything to do with the actual competition on the floor.

It tells me we have a nation full of supposed hoop junkies who are ignoring the biggest rush of the year. I have one game to go to complete this journey and if watching Ivan and Virginia didn't make me miss my wife so much and I wasn't in danger of coming down with scurvy and I hadn't run out of boxers four days ago -- "Just turn em inside out," said one NAIA official -- I'd wish to the hoop gods that this tourney would never end.

Although, after more than 55 hours of live hoops I have begun to fear for my mental health. I was so tired two nights ago when I saw players with Allen Iverson's No. 3 on their shoes, I thought for a moment that it was a tribute to Dale Earnhardt. The other night when I watched brain surgery on the Discovery channel I actually thought to myself, Hey that thing looks a lot like a basketball, I wonder if I could dunk it? And when the lady at the coffee stand asked me how many cream and sugars to put in my coffee I yelled back: "One-n-one, even though everybody in the arena knows I was shooting when you fouled me!"

If the NAIA was smart they'd seriously begin to cultivate this tournament's cult following. For starters they need to move the dates, so it can become a precursor to the NCAA. And then they should start something like a Club 31 or The NAIAdicts, and give away certificates and T-shirts for fans who attend every game.

I don't know about you, but I'd join any club with Ivan and Virginia as charter members.

David Fleming, a senior writer for The Magazine, shares his perspective each week on ESPNMAG.com. E-mail flemfile@aol.com.