Spring comes on forever, and with it the blossomy pronouncements of baseball’s preseason. Managers burgeon with optimism. Players predict unrealistic possibilities. Fans believe it all.

Of course, about 90 percent of them are wrong.

Only the winners are correct. And that brings me, if in a roundabout way, to this season’s Kansas University men’s basketball team.

This is a team everyone expected to be good. Sage media pundits predicted a league championship which, as you know, became a reality on Monday night.

This is not a team, however, everyone expected to be quite this good. Few would have imagined the Jayhawks ranked No. 1 in the polls in the third week of February.

Kansas had perceived weaknesses back in October. The Jayhawks didn’t have a small forward and it was impossible to know if the Jayhawks really had a bench.

Now we know KU had a small forward after all. The problem was perception. Nobody envisioned Kirk Hinrich as a small forward because he stood a mere 6-foot-3 and had a “Point Guard” label on his forehead. Few realized Hinrich could play either point guard, shooting guard or small forward. Nobody imagined him as a three-in-one player. By displaying his versatility, Hinrich blossomed into an all-league performer.

Then there is Drew Gooden, erratic as a freshman and promising as a sophomore, yet most wondered if or when he would put it all together. We wonder no more.

Last fall, everyone was ready to hand Missouri’s Kareem Rush the Big 12 Conference MVP award on a silver platter. Now Gooden is a cinch. You don’t lead the league in scoring and rebounding and play for the championship team and NOT win the MVP award.

How did Gooden’s game galvanize to the point where, as a junior, he will almost certainly be playing his last game in Allen Fieldhouse a week from tonight against Kansas State?

Something Gooden said before the season  words that sounded at the time like just so much preseason rhetoric  ring true today, months after he uttered them. Gooden was asked about the Jayhawks having to play this season without seven-footer Eric Chenowith.

Gooden didn’t pull any punches.

“I’m going to be honest,” he said. “It kind of gives us room to operate outside now. Nothing bad against Eric  he was my teammate for two years  but Eric was Eric. This just gives us a little bit more room to work.”

Without coming right out and saying Chenowith’s lack of speed and athleticism had crimped the Jayhawks’ transition game, Gooden remarked: “Me and Nick (Collison). We can run.”

Oh, boy, can they ever. So can Hinrich, seasoned senior Jeff Boschee and freshman Aaron Miles, the perfect complementary point guard. Williams has had some terrific transition teams in the past. This one might be his best, but who’s to say?

Another reason for Gooden’s ascension to lottery-pick status has nothing to do with the Jayhawks playing his style of basketball. It was more of a mind game Williams played upon him.

Again, I take you back to last October when Gooden told the media that Williams wanted him to score more, rebound more and to be more of a leader.

“He didn’t ask this my freshman year or my sophomore year,” Gooden said. “This is the first year he’s really asked me to step up and do that.”

Still, as important as Gooden and Hinrich have been, the whole must always equal the sum of its parts and the parts Williams has assembled fit so well that Iowa State’s Larry Eustachy, for one, could only marvel the other night at how Williams had assembled this crew and fashioned it into a dynamo.

“This team is as together,” Eustachy said, “as any team I’ve ever seen coached.”

Is this a Kansas team of destiny? No way of knowing. By the time March rolls around, 64 schools will believe they are teams of destiny, and only one will emerge from the NCAA crapshoot.