Talking about race is a sign of progress.

So, a wise-cracking sportswriter said Vanderbilt University's basketball team has "too many white guys" to beat Western Michigan in the NCAA dance. The scribbler was Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe, yakking on national radio. Good for him.

No big deal that his prediction missed. Vandy beat Western Michigan, then N.C. State. It lost to Connecticut, as have many teams no matter their complexions. But being wrong on a trifle is an occupational hazard that will not prevent Ryan from climbing to the end of the next trembling limb, there to laugh at Dame Fortune.

More important, his white-guys line served a higher purpose. It was a small ray of disinfecting sunshine on a subject once such a taboo that we ink-stained wretches, though aware of what we saw, dared not mention it in print. Ryan's truth-in-jesting line was delivered with a wry spin that suggests we've come far enough in a dialogue on race in sports to try for a touch of real-world fun with it.

It wasn't always so. The 1966 NCAA championship game, Kentucky against Texas Western (now UTEP), is memorable because it was the first title game matching five black starters against five whites. The sportswriter David Israel called it "the Brown vs. Board of Education of college basketball."

With that phrase, Israel summarized the social, cultural and political significance of a simple basketball game. But he didn't write it that day; he was then a schoolboy. The major Kentucky newspapers of 1966, the Louisville Courier-Journal and Lexington Herald, didn't cast the game in racial terms. Nor did the time's preeminent national sports magazine, Sports Illustrated; its reporter, Frank Deford, never mentioned race.

At courtside that day, Bill Conlin of the Philadelphia Daily News began his column, "They came waving Confederate flags, determined to cling to a vanishing tradition. They cheered and they pleaded and they chanted Dixie, but it was no use. The tradition melted in the heat of a battle, and race became unimportant. Suddenly, it was no longer a showdown between five white basketball players from the University of Kentucky and five Negroes from Texas Western."

Then he dropped the subject: "Suddenly, it was an exciting game between two fine teams ..."