If you remember the golden days of Holy Cross sports, you also remember the Korean War, iceboxes, the Army-McCarthy hearings, and the Boston Braves. You have qualified for Medicare and you can withdraw from your 401K without penalty.

It’s common these days to speak of a sports world “before ESPN.’’ Holy Cross was great before television . New England sports fans loved Holy Cross before America Loved Lucy.

The Holy Cross football team played in the Orange Bowl in 1946. A year later, the Crusaders won the NCAA basketball tournament with help from freshman ballhandler Bob Cousy. The HC baseball team won the College World Series at Omaha in 1952, and two years later, Tommy Heinsohn, Ronnie Perry, and Togo Palazzi won the NIT for Holy Cross.

Then came the explosion of college sports. Television helped make the college game a billion-dollar industry. In the heady days of NCAA proliferation and de facto professionalization, Holy Cross went the other way. HC got rid of athletic scholarships. The Crusaders stopped playing Syracuse and Boston College in football, downgrading to Division 1-AA (now the “Subdivision’’ of Division 1). HC’s vaunted basketball program said “no’’ to Dave Gavitt’s Big East Conference. The big-time college sports train left Worcester and never returned.

But now Holy Cross has a spot in the NCAA Tournament. When CBS unveils the March Madness brackets on Sunday night (a show more suspenseful and self-important than the Oscars), the tiny Jesuit school from Worcester will take its place alongside behemoth programs Duke, North Carolina, Indiana, and Kentucky. Wonder if there’ll be any other school in the field with only 1,400 male students?

It is both miracle and mirage. The Crusaders play in the academic-fueled Patriot League with the likes of Army, Navy, Lehigh, and Bucknell. The Patriot League will never be confused with the SEC. Esteemed author John Feinstein chronicled the 1999-2000 basketball season in the Patriot League (the book is titled “The Last Amateurs’’) and fished this quote out of Crusader benchwarmer Chris Spitler: “Let’s see if I’ve got this straight: I’m the worst player on the worst team in the worst conference in Division 1. Wow! I’m the worst Division 1 player in the whole country.’’

There have been seasons when the Patriot League had tourney-worthy teams. Fourteenth-seeded Bucknell beat third-seeded Kansas in 2005. Holy Cross threw scares into Kentucky, Kansas, and Marquette early this century. But the league annually ranks near the bottom in conference power rankings, and the 2015-16 Holy Cross Crusaders were one of the conference’s worst teams. The Crusaders went 5-13 in the league and were seeded ninth in the conference tournament. They failed to win a conference game on the road.

Then they got hot. Led by coach Bill Carmody and junior forward Malachi Alexander, the Crusaders won at Loyola (Md.), Bucknell, Army, and Lehigh. They became the 20th team since 1985 to qualifty for the NCAA Tournament with a losing record. At 14-19, they are one of only five teams in history to make the NCAA tourney after losing as many as 19 games. They are certainly headed to Dayton, Ohio, for a play-in game between No. 16 seeds on Tuesday or Wednesday.

No one in Worcester is complaining. Just getting into the tourney is a major accomplishment. A play-in win would be gravy. For all the old-timey talk about Holy Cross as a once-great basketball institution, the Crusaders have not won a game in the NCAA Tournament since 1953. That was Heinsohn’s freshman year at the Cross, an era when freshmen were ineligible for varsity competition.

“Hopefully, this will rekindle a program which really meant an awful lot to an awful lot of people over the years,’’ Heinsohn said Wednesday night after learning of HC’s bid-clinching victory.

“We won the NIT when the NIT was bigger than the NCAA [Tournament]. We ended up [No.] 1 or 2 in the country that year. We always had strong programs that competed. We were playing top-10 teams for many, many years, but that was downgraded. The whole makeup of sports is completely different. When I was there, there were 2,500 boys. Now there’s 2,500 boys and girls, and the girls outnumber the boys, so it’s completely different . . . My congratulations to the coach and his players. It hasn’t happened in a long time.’’

This is the Crusaders’ ninth trip to the tournament since Heinsohn was a freshman; they’ve lost in the first round each time.

They endured some epic near-misses along the way. In 1977, George Blaney’s Crusaders faced top-ranked Michigan (Phil Hubbard, Rickey Green) and led the Wolverines at halftime before losing by 11. Under Ralph Willard, the Crusaders had three close calls from 2001-03. Seeded 15th, they looked ready to beat Kentucky in 2001 before Tayshaun Prince buried them with a jumper. Seeded 16th a year later, HC led top-ranked Kansas at halftime but lost by 11. Seeded 14th in ’03, the Crusaders took Dwyane Wade’s Final Four Marquette team to the edge, losing by 4 points.

Holy Cross earned a 13-seed in 2007 and lost to Southern Illinois.

Now the Crusaders are back, a purple blast from the past, looking for their school’s first NCAA Tournament win in 63 years.

Dan Shaughnessy can be reached at daniel.shaughnessy@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @Dan_Shaughnessy.