INDIANAPOLIS — As fresh as Hinkle Fieldhouse may feel — nearly $50 million spent over the past decade has provided quite a face lift — ghosts of the basketball cathedral’s past remain to greet visitors. Names carved into a nearly century-old wooden ledge are still visible beneath slick navy paint. Wads and wads of gum, long ago petrified, are glued to the underside of the now-padded bleachers in the fieldhouse’s upper reaches.
Then there are the wooden benches where the tiny Hickory team sat in a musty locker room near the end of “Hoosiers,” the 1986 movie classic about an unlikely run to the Indiana high school basketball championship.