CHAMPAIGN -- For some players, the IHSA boys' basketball state tournament is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. For Alan Dale, it's a few more.

He hasn't missed one since 1966 -- well, except the 2020 tournament, since "everybody missed that one" when it was canceled due to COVID-19.

Dale came to the tournament for the first few times as a high school student, but he said this all really started with a car crash.

"The third tournament I came down here, I got hit by a car as a pedestrian east of the football field," Dale said. "I was down here for a long time in the hospital."

As he was laid up with a brand new rod in his leg, University of Illinois students from his hometown and their friends he had never met smuggled McDonald's into the hospital for him.

"I decided that's where I'm going to school," Dale said.

In the years since, he has followed the tournament from Champaign to Peoria and back.

Some years, he's able to follow the season and know which teams to root for, but if a team in his area isn't doing particularly well, it's more difficult.

This season was one of those, so he'll just see what the teams are like as they play.

Either way, Dale attends every single game.

"The speed has increased, the athleticism has increased, but the size hasn't," he said of the last 60 years. "I played against 6-8 and 6-9 guys when I was in high school."

The coaching style has changed, too, and of course the game itself changed with the addition of the three-point line.

Dale doesn't follow pro basketball (though he's a lifelong Boston Celtics fan), but he's seen the high school and college careers of players who went on to see success.

He said that he could talk about a hundred different players he enjoyed watching, but two came to mind: Marty Simmons and Derrick Rose.

Simmons, whom Dale described as carrying his team as a high-scorer, went on to a successful college career before moving to coaching. Currently, he's the men's basketball coach at Eastern Illinois University.

Rose, Dale said, wasn't such a high scorer but had an impressive command of the court and understanding of the right moves for his whole team to make both offensively and defensively.

"He literally took a game over," Dale said. "The league championship game, I was sitting right under the basket and I called my son. I said, 'If you're anywhere near a TV, turn this on.'"

Rose went on to a college and professional career, retiring from the Memphis Grizzlies last year.

Dale is still forming new memories, though.

In the first game of the day, 5-foot-7 point guard Tyjuan Hunter of the Hope Academy Eagles out of Chicago tossed up a shot from a point in front of the free-throw line ... to the opposite basket.

Dale described it arcing perfectly, bouncing off the backboard and through the net.

"It didn't rattle or anything," he said.