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Indianapolis. Hinkle Fieldhouse looks like a brick airplane hangar, rising above the neighboring houses at one corner of the Butler University campus. When a basketball game is played there, the cheers spill through its cracks, leaky roof and high windows.

There is no video board. There are no luxury suites. The locker rooms are tight and the concourse congested. Butler’s athletic department offices are squeezed here and there in the recesses under the 10,000-seat bleachers.

It is all decidedly, wonderfully old school, even for an old school, founded in 1855. One of the best men’s college basketball programs in the country lives here, as no-frills as the famous barn in which it plays.

There is something different about Butler. It stands out amid a college basketball landscape where bigger, newer and brasher are confused with success. Butler commands attention simply because it wins, quietly.

Without even the desire for a new arena, without nationally renowned recruits or well-recognized coaches, without a large fan base, Butler has become a sustained midmajor power. In a state that cherishes small-town basketball, Butler feels more Indiana than Indiana — or Purdue, Notre Dame or any other college that garners more attention.

Butler (28-4), riding a 20-game winning streak, has reached the NCAA tournament for the fourth season in a row. It earned a No. 5 seed in the West Region and will play No. 12 Texas-El Paso (26-6) on Thursday in San Jose, California.

Butler has reached the Round of 16 twice, in 2003 and 2007, and makes no secret of its aspirations for a national championship this year — when the Final Four will be played in Indianapolis at Lucas Oil Stadium.

Butler, a liberal-arts college with about 4,000 students, is tucked into a residential neighborhood five miles north of downtown Indianapolis. It plays in the Horizon League, typically a one-bid conference in the NCAA tournament.

Butler has not had a player go on to the NBA in decades, although that may change soon. The basketball program has built a reputation as a jumping-off spot for young, rising coaches, the type of upheaval that threatens a program’s upward momentum.

Even current players could not have expected a few years ago that Butler would establish itself as a perennial power. “I’d be crazy to tell you that, and you’d think I was crazy for telling you,” junior forward Matt Howard said.

Butler hardly dazzles recruits with its home arena, and has lost some because of it.

“If you’re thinking about that, you’re probably thinking about yourself a lot,” Howard said.

Hinkle Fieldhouse has been Butler’s arena since 1928, but its most famous game was not a Butler game at all.

It came in 1954, when tiny Milan High School beat Muncie Central in the final of the Indiana high school state tournament. The upset still defines this state’s sports history. It served as inspiration for the film “Hoosiers,” where the climactic final game (recast as a 1952 story about fictitious Hickory High) was filmed at Hinkle.

The high school finals have not been played there for about 40 years, though, having moved on to newer arenas. Indiana boys and girls no longer dream of someday playing at Hinkle Fieldhouse. No players on this Butler team were even born when “Hoosiers” was released in 1986.

Maybe it is time to consider doing what so many other colleges have done in the endless pursuit of victories and prestige: build a new arena filled with video boards, sprawling locker rooms, luxury suites, training rooms, practice courts and players’ lounges, and surround it with a sponsored brick pathway and plop a bronze statue of the mascot out front.

“You can get out right now,” said Collier, the athletic director credited with building the foundation of a program that he coached from 1989 to 2000. “There’s too much good here.”

Ten of the 15 players on Butler’s roster are from Indiana, most from small towns such as Connersville, Noblesville and New Castle. They grew up knowing more about the story of “Hoosiers” than about Butler. To them, Hinkle Fieldhouse was where Bobby Plump hit the last-second shot to win the 1954 title game for Milan High School, not where Plump later starred for Butler.

“The rims are 10 feet here, too,” said Howard, a reference to a scene in “Hoosiers” where the coach, played by Gene Hackman, has the rims measured to demonstrate players should not be awed by the big arena.

Butler’s continued success may keep it from playing in a sort of basketball time capsule forever. The 6-8 sophomore Gordon Hayward, a do-everything forward, is being projected as a possible first-round NBA draft pick this year, should he decide to leave school. He grew up in Brownsburg, on the northwestern fringe of Indianapolis.

“In high school, my dad asked me about Butler,” Hayward said. “There was no way. I never came to Butler, and I was only 20 minutes away.”

A college once famous for its hulking, brick arena is finally gaining notice more for the basketball team that plays inside it.

“Now,” Hayward said, “a lot of people know Butler.”

  Basketball

The New York Times