A constant whisper once surrounded talented high school athletes across the country. It was the whisper of expectations and dreams for a community. Those whispers acted as a blanket in the tough reality of a world, We are here for you.

That whisper was drowned out by professional athletes and by competitive traveling sports teams. Suddenly it was not as important for athletes to take their community with them. The idea of community was lost and with it, the whisper.

But in Indiana that whisper lives on. It charges through the rows of golden corn and bounds off the new high tech buildings those cornstalks back up to in the cities until it resonates and roars, filling the spaces that most people allow silence to fill.

In his 1997 book 'Where the Game Matters Most,' William Gildea wrote that Indiana high school basketball "is as universal as the freight whistle there."

“The game binds people and places," Gildea wrote. "They’re all Hoosiers.”

And in the Indiana towns of Carmel and Chesterton that whisper is as loud as Bobby Knight was fierce. It fills newspapers and feeds coffee talk from town to town.

In Carmel’s massive gymnasiums, 12-year-olds shoot with one thought in their heads.

I want to shoot like Stu Douglass.

And 160 miles northwest in Chesterton, the city still knows Zack Novak simply as Zack — there’s no need for last names of high school stars who started signing autographs as freshmen in high school. Young kids approach Novak’s old coach and ask, “What do I need to do to be as good as him?”

And while those whispers of Stu and Zack in Indiana are murmuring votes of confidence, the whispers in Big Ten basketball circles concerning the Michigan basketball team are a defeatist inquiry: What in the world are you going to be able to do this year?

And for the team’s two junior co-captains: Where are you going to lead this team?

They smirk. They’re one step ahead of you. You don’t have to talk about the low expectations most have for this team or the fact that they, as juniors, are the oldest and most experienced players this year.

Because it doesn’t matter. They know that and they’ve moved past it.

Both have been the underdog before. They know what it feels like to be overlooked, and they refuse to be rattled by the expectations of others. Rather, they’d love to silence the critics and allow those Indiana whispers to travel a little farther north.

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We’re standing in the tunnel of Crisler Arena when Stu asks me whether I know how to start this story. Absolutely not, I tell him.

He throws back his head, laughs and tells me he has the perfect start for the story.

Would that work? He asks me with a crooked smile after telling me an inventive tale that clearly could never be printed.

Stu is the one whose emotions are written on his face, the one who smiles with his eyes. His high school coach Mark Galloway described him as a coach’s dream — he had an ability to set high goals and against all odds, achieve them.

Whenever Stu wouldn’t succeed Galloway would tell him, “You can get bitter or you can get better.”

He would always get better. He always pushed the envelope. He always stepped back once more to see if he could hit the shot when it was just a bit farther out.

But four years ago, before Stu signed with Michigan, Galloway told Stu that his goal of playing Big Ten basketball was too big of a dream — he was too small, he wasn’t an Indiana All-Star. Galloway was all for Stu setting high goals but he wanted them to be realistic. Stu could settle for a smaller Division II school or Harvard, which he had also visited, where his talents would be of immediate impact.

Stu could understand where Galloway was coming from. But when his mother told him that he should set his sights lower, he decided he had heard enough from the “realists.”

“I was like, ‘There is no question, Mom. I’m playing at Michigan’,” Stu tells me.

He had faced this kind of skepticism before. After a less than impressive freshman campaign on the varsity basketball team at Hamilton Heights High School, Stu’s family moved and he transferred to the affluent Carmel High School, one of the best schools in the state, both academically and athletically, with a student body of more than 4,000.

Galloway put him on the JV team his sophomore year.