It’s been a long time, more than a decade, but Bob Knight is relevant again. And there’s not a better story in the Sweet 16 than that of the discredited and banished coach who has reasserted his will and talent on the game that had seemed to have passed him by.

Bob Knight, in two words, is back. And you have to go back to Richard Nixon after he lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960 to find someone who was as universally reviled and as emphatically — and prematurely — consigned to the rubbish heap of his profession.

The difference is that Nixon’s triumphant return to the national political stage didn’t turn out to be the feel-good hit of the day. Knight’s return, on the other hand, would have the makings of a hit basketball movie about an underdog school that shocked its little part of the world if it hadn’t already been made — Hoosiers.

Knight hasn’t won the tournament, and it’s not likely he will. But he’s taken a team that wasn’t supposed to go anywhere, led by a walk-on guard named Ronald Ross, into the Sweet 16, beating third-seeded Gonzaga — or, as Knight pronounces it, Gon-zay-guh — in the process. If he can get by another upstart, West Virginia, he’ll be in the Elite Eight.

He’s doing it with good humor, praises his team as the best group of kids he’s ever been around, and may just be turning in the best coaching job of his career.

It’s hard to believe of a guy who needs just two more decent seasons to pass Dean Smith as the winningest coach in men’s collegiate basketball. But it’s been a long time since a Knight-led team has made any noise other than a painful groan in the NCAA Tournament.

The last time Knight got as far as the Sweet 16 was 11 years ago. That was 1994 and Knight was still the basketball god of Indiana who would never leave Bloomington. Just two years earlier, Knight’s Indiana Hoosiers had been to the Final Four. Five years before that, they had won a third national championship for their irascible coach thanks to Keith Smart’s jumper.

But since then, Knight was, come tournament time, anything but one of the greatest coaches to ever terrorize a locker room and outrage legions of sports columnists. In eight trips to the NCAAs beginning in 1995, he had compiled a record of 3-8, never getting past the second round and being eliminated five times in the first round.

But that seemed the least of his problems. His career unraveled in Bloomington with the deterioration of his behavior matched by the university’s decreasing tolerance of it. He was finally run out of town five years ago, and that seemed the end of Bob Knight.

When Texas Tech invited him to come down to Lubbock, 100 faculty members signed a petition declaring that to bring this basketball bully to their institution would be an abomination to everything the university stood for.

That was four years ago. Since then, other than some unnecessarily acerbic comments directed at the university’s chancellor in the vegetable department of a local supermarket, Knight has been everything any school could hope for.

He’s turned a perennial loser into a consistent winner. His kids attend class and even graduate. He hasn’t choked, whipped, kicked or hit anyone and hasn’t even thrown any pottery at a secretary.

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