Enberg, 72, has 50 seasons of NCAA memories to harken back on. Although he hasn’t been involved in the tournament every year, he was the play-by-play voice for the 1961 NCAA championship game.

‘I was a graduate student at Indiana,” he recalled. “The national final telecast was consumed by Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio. There was no other telecast. There wasn’t even a national radio broadcast of the championship game.

“It was a pretty good game, too — overtime, and Cincinnati beat Ohio State. It just reminds me that in my lifetime that we have gone from a sport that was there and had very little publicity to the giant that it has now become.”

Enberg, who has won 14 Emmys and nine Sportscaster of the Year awards, was the anchor for college basketball’s most notable broadcast team, which included analysts Billy Packer and the late Al McGuire.

“Al McGuire, after winning — maybe, when you think about it, the biggest upset in a national final ever, when Marquette, the last team in, won in ’77 — and then joined Billy and I in ’78,” Enberg said. “Al, always looking for a way to make another dollar, we’d leave the Game fo the Week and Al would say, ‘Dixie, this sport is going to be big, big, big.’ He repeated it if he really meant it. ‘Big, big, big’ is has become.”