In case you’d forgotten, West Virginia coach Bob Huggins said the quiet part out loud before the 2021-22 college basketball season began. His view: The power conference schools should break off and form their own championship tournament to control – and, theoretically enhance – the revenue flowing from it.

“They’re doing it in football,” Huggins was quoted by ESPN’s Myron Medcalf during Big 12 media day in October. “Why wouldn’t they do it? The presidents and athletic directors that have all the juice, why wouldn’t they do it? Makes no sense why they wouldn’t do it. I think it’s more ‘Why wouldn’t they?’ than ‘Why would they?’ And then, the other people, they can have their own tournament.”

And then he tossed this grenade:

“Those Cinderella schools are putting 200 people, at best, in their gym. We’re putting 14,000.”

The best response to that? The context may not be exact, but we defer to Saint Peter’s coach Shaheen Holloway in a CBS postgame interview after his 15th-seeded Peacocks toppled another high seed, No. 3 Purdue, Friday night in Philadelphia: “What they gonna say now?”

During the off-day interview session Saturday, he elaborated.

“Some people kind of took that the wrong way,” he said. “What I meant by it is you hear all these stories about why we shouldn’t be here, and my thing is every year a team like us is there. So it’s just one of those stories, it’s a great story, yes, it’s a Cinderella story. It’s great that the whole country is behind us. That’s kind of what this NCAA Tournament is all about.

“That’s why it’s so much different than pro sports. Stories like this don’t really happen. They happen once every year (in college) and everybody kind of gets behind it, especially the last two years with COVID and everything. It’s a great story, and I’m just happy that we’re a part of it.”

Bottom line: Holloway’s team is one game away from becoming the first 15 seed to reach the Final Four. Huggins has had enough time on his hands to do in-studio TV commentary after his team went 16-17 and missed the tournament altogether.

(Maybe he’s still sore about his team being upset by in-state rival and 13 seed Marshall in 2018.)

The unexpected successes, bracket-busting upsets and occasional out-of-nowhere competitors on the second weekend have given March Madness much of its charm over the years. To begrudge that is to be an insufferable grump. Then again, this is College Sports Inc., and many of those in charge of programs with huge athletic budgets tend to be exactly that type of insufferable grump.

The power conferences and their schools wangled themselves additional autonomy at the most recent NCAA convention in January, with what The Associated Press described as a “new, pared-down constitution …paving the way for a decentralized approach to governing college sports that will hand more power to schools and conferences.”

A paragraph deeper down in that Jan. 20 AP story outlines what we’re really talking about here, and it’s not Division I’s autonomy from Divisions II and III as much as it is potentially redefining how deep the wealth should be shared within the 358-school top division. The issues, it said, “include the requirements for Division I membership; who has a say in making rules across the division; what schools and conferences get automatic access to championship events; how revenue is shared; and what limits, if any, should be placed on financial benefits to athletes?”

Yeah, the administrators are concerned about the NIL revolution – big surprise – but the larger issue seems to be how, or if, the Pac-12s should coexist with the Big Wests, WACs and Mountain Wests of the world.

The basketball people see the way their college football brethren have leveraged the closed shop of their four-team playoff, even as popular sentiment in that sport leans toward more teams, more games and a seat at the table for somebody from the sport’s middle class. But who cares what the public enjoys when the already powerful and wealthy can keep more of the rewards for themselves, right?

Similarly, the traditional basketball powers supposedly drive TV ratings, but it is Saint Peter’s, the 3,009-student Jesuit school from Jersey City, that has captured the attention of the country this month. And while nobody has yet addressed the big-vs.-small issue directly, I’m willing to bet conference commissioners and university presidents and athletic directors at the top 70 or so institutions are having quiet conversations about how to uncouple themselves from the rest.

Think of it this way: Unless you are a devoted Duke fan, Mike Krzyzewski’s five titles are pretty much indistinguishable. Moments stand out, such as the Christian Laettner play in the 1992 regional final against Kentucky, and the upset in the 1991 national semifinal over defending champ UNLV one year after the Rebels smoked ’em 123-73 in the championship game. Otherwise, don’t they all run together?

But we remember Virginia Commonwealth as an 11 seed getting to the Final Four in 2011 for Shaka Smart, Loyola of Chicago doing the same in 2018 and making a star out of Sister Jean, the Ramblers’ first fan, and Florida Gulf Coast getting to the Sweet 16 as a 15th seed in 2013 and putting Andy Enfield on USC’s radar. We remember Gonzaga getting to the regional final as a 10 seed in 1999, and how it helped turn what had been a nondescript program into a monster.

And yes, those of us who were around Cal State Fullerton in 1978 will never forget how a program that was in just its fourth year in Division I, and essentially the last seed in what was then a 32-team tournament, came within three points of getting to the Final Four. Those Titans were the NCAA Tournament’s first true Cinderella, one year before Magic Johnson and Larry Bird took the stage and March Madness started its transition into a cultural phenomenon. (And by the way, how much do you think the big schools sneered at Bird’s Indiana State team back in ’79?)

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If you don’t have a dog in this fight, or if your bracket has been irretrievably busted, I suspect you’ll be pulling for Saint Peter’s on Sunday. Along with that, we should be pulling for good sense to prevail, and for March Madness to remain inclusive rather than becoming exclusive.

After all, as Holloway put it Saturday in the interview room:

“It’s the American dream, man.”

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