DETROIT — This story began many basketball seasons ago, with the long, slow, steady demise of America's auto industry, taking down with it one of the nation's great cities.

Its pace quickened last fall, when, as the stock market plummeted and the Big Three gasped for air, practice began at Michigan State for the 2008-09 men's basketball season.

As the season progressed, the Spartans became the class of the Big Ten, which wasn't saying all that much, at least according to the college basketball intelligentsia. MSU was considered a good team bordering on great, but then lost in the Big Ten tournament and ended up with No. 2 seed for the NCAAs.

That meant a minefield of a path awaited them to reach the Final Four: a Sweet 16 date with defending champion Kansas, an Elite Eight meeting with top-ranked Louisville, then a Final Four game with favored Connecticut in, of all places, the biggest city in the state. The Spartans would be coming to Detroit, the capital of the nation's economic plight with its 22% unemployment rate, but a city that also happens to be little more than an hour's drive from the MSU campus in East Lansing.

Improbably, the Spartans won every game, and in such a fashion that they have become not only a feel-good story for a city and state desperately in need of such a moment, but a cause celebre, at least for one more night, for a nation obsessed with the diversion of its brackets and the desperation of its 401(k)'s.

"There's always a story line," Michigan State coach Tom Izzo said Sunday. "This happens to be ours."

Every so often, a sports story finds a collective emotional need and does its best to fill it. The New York Yankees' presence in the 2001 World Series symbolized the nation's attempt to recover from the Sept. 11 attacks. The New Orleans Saints gave their city a bounce in its step after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2006.

There obviously has not been the tragic loss of life in Detroit that there was on Sept. 11 or during Katrina, but it's the loss of so many livelihoods, and life as America once knew it, that makes the Spartans' run to the national championship every bit as compelling.

"There are a lot of cities right now that have problems," Izzo said. "But this is ours. This is our big city in the state. So that's why I think it's a little more meaningful for those of us that are from around here. … I hope we were a ray of sunshine, a distraction for them, diversion, anything else we can be. … We're not carrying them on our shoulders like we're trying to save the world. We're carrying them on our shoulders because we care and it's our state."

People around the country don't usually root for Detroit. If anything, they laugh at the city. Those of us who grew up around here have lived with this knowledge for decades. It sometimes gets so bad that we have to explain that there are actual neighborhoods and suburbs here, with beautiful homes. Trees, even.

But now, as March Madness stretches into April, the sports nation is cheering for an eminently likeable and talented coach from the state's Upper Peninsula (a proud "Youper") with a roster including eight Michigan kids, playing before a raucous crowd of more than 72,000, most of them dressed in MSU green and white.

"We are the blue-collar team," Izzo said. "This is the blue-collar city. It was just amazing to walk out of that tunnel."

Once before in this city, an iconic team emerged in a turbulent time to win a title. As Detroit reeled over its devastating 1967 riots and the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., its Tigers marched to the '68 American League pennant and a memorable World Series victory against St. Louis.

"I was 13 that summer, and I remember it very well," Izzo said. "I didn't know as much about the rioting at the time because I was a little sheltered back then in the UP, but I've certainly read about it since. I've learned about how sports heal all wounds.

"Now, we're not the Tigers," Izzo added with a smile, "but if we can continue to bring a little bit of happiness to this city, that would be great."

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