There's enough depression going on about Wisconsin sports to keep Prozac flowing like jelly beans.

The Packers, Bucks and Brewers all have boatloads of problems and nobody seems close to winning a championship.

That's why it was so striking last week to get Sports Illustrated from a friend of mine. He was struck by the same thing I was. When was the last time that basketball programs from both the University of Wisconsin and Marquette were featured in the same issue of a national magazine?

The answer, undoubtedly, is never.

But there it was, big as life.

In the college basketball section, a story on Marquette and Dominic James. And on the back page in Rick Reilly's column, a story on Bo Ryan and the Badgers.

This is pretty heady stuff.

In the Marquette article, they compared James to Dwyane Wade. In Reilly's column, he called Bo his favorite college basketball coach.

The question has to be asked: "What in the world has happened here?"

In his seminal book, "The City Game," the late Pete Axthelm, who was a friend of mine, wrote about basketball and the heroes who made it the game it is today. He talked about basketball as the game of the streets.

Great basketball players come from the East Coast, cities like New York and Philadelphia, or they come from the West Coast, in cities like Los Angeles. Some great players come from the South. Some come from big cities like Chicago or Atlanta.

But, there aren't any great players in Wisconsin. This is football country, not basketball country.

But on the Wisconsin team, a team that was ranked second in the country before losing to Indiana on Thursday, nine of the 16 players are from Wisconsin. The picture is much different at Marquette, where only one of the 14 players is from the state.

There is no one reason why these two teams are behaving so spectacularly.

Surely, coaching and recruiting goes a long, long way. Both Ryan and Tom Crean have players who have bought into the programs they run, both on and off the court.

Ryan has a long, long history as a winning coach and has taught the same swing offense at every place he's stopped. He has paid close attention to his state and good players in Wisconsin are more likely than not to go to Wisconsin. And when he gets them, Ryan puts the pieces together.

At Marquette, Crean has proven he can recruit with the big boys. And he's a master when it comes to motivating players to play hard all the time. You've got to love the passion Crean's teams play with.

If they were women, Ryan and Wisconsin would be Queen Elizabeth while Crean's Golden Eagles would be Mariah Carey.

But more than recruiting or coaching or players, the climate has changed.

Thanks to professional basketball, the Bucks and Michael Jordan and Larry Bird and LeBron James, more and more kids are taking basketball seriously. The climate has changed. You see just as many basketball jerseys as football when you see a crowd of young people.

And as the saying goes, as far as basketball goes, more is better.

The only thing left for us to hope for is that both the Badgers and Golden Eagles get seeded positions in different regionals and that they meet in the Final Four.

God, can you stand it?