EAST LANSING – Indiana basketball is among the reasons for Michigan State fans to fear what’s next.

What’s become of the Hoosiers is a reminder to live in the present, to boast gently, to take nothing for granted, to be grateful for what you have, while you have it.

Because there are no guarantees. Not even for the blue bloods of college basketball.

As MSU travels to Bloomington, Indiana, for Saturday’s noon tipoff against the Hoosiers, the Spartans are three wins from their ninth Big Ten championship in the last 22 years. Those 22 years, beginning with Tom Izzo’s first conference title in his third season, are decidedly similar to the best 22 years for Indiana under Bobby Knight.

MSU is 564-202 overall, a .736 win percentage, including a .715 win percentage in Big Ten play, with a national championship, seven Final Fours, nine Elite Eights and 13 Sweet 16 appearances. This will be the Spartans’ 22nd straight NCAA tournament.

Indiana, from 1972 through 1994, went 521-152, a .772 win percentage, including .729 in Big Ten play, with 10 Big Ten titles, three national titles, five Final Fours, eight Elite Eights and 12 Sweet 16s.

In other words, MSU under Izzo, sans another national championship or two, has become Indiana under Knight. The Big Ten’s chief basketball power for the last two decades is a football school.

Meanwhile, the Hoosiers, with all of their hoops fever and history, are a mere 393-294, a .572 win percentage over the last 22 years — including this season’s 14-14 mark. They’re barely above .500 in the Big Ten over that span, with one Final Four, four Sweet 16s, two NIT appearances and six years of no postseason at all. That’s Jud Heathcote-level stuff. Solid. Middling. Occasionally great. Sometimes far from it. That’s what Indiana basketball has been for as long as any Big Ten player has been alive.

Every year, when the Champions Classic rolls around in November, I think, it must irk the heck out of Indiana fans that it’s MSU, and not the Hoosiers, in a field with Duke, Kentucky and Kansas. That should be Indiana’s spot, as the Big Ten country’s representative.

There is perhaps nobody on earth who understands both Indiana and MSU basketball, their histories and the reasons for their present-day situations better than Dane Fife. Tom Crean is probably a close second. Fife was recruited by Izzo and Knight coming out of Clarkston in the late 1990s, he played for Knight at Indiana and was there for Knight’s final days and transition that followed. He began his coaching career at Indiana, as an assistant for two seasons under Mike Davis. And, for the last eight seasons, has been on Izzo’s staff at MSU.

“What makes a program, generally starts and ends with the coach,” Fife said. “Coach Knight is, in my mind, one of the great coaches of all-time. And that’s hard to replace. Just like it’ll be next to impossible to replace Coach Izzo. So any expectations of trying to maintain a program the way Coach Knight did, it’s almost impossible. Just like it will be to try to maintain the kind of program that Izzo has maintained.”

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Indiana has been through four head coaches in those 22 years. It’s fired three. The natives aren’t thrilled with the fourth right now. Finding the right coach to follow the legend who built it is an exercise in guess work and prayer, made more difficult by expectations created by that legend.

“Everybody’s used to winning around here for as long as Coach Izzo has been here,” Fife continued. “I think we should all take the time to appreciate the coach he is, but more importantly the leader. He’s in great company as far as leaders. Not just college basketball coaches, but leaders.”

That’ll likely be better appreciated 22 years after Izzo is done at MSU.

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Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.