Milwaukee ? Bruce Pearl has been invoking biblical references for the last week or so to describe the mission of his basketball team, so it was only fitting Monday that he probably could’ve used a staff to part the figurative sea of reporters awaiting his arrival.

“This is something a little different than a normal practice,” he said.

And so it was.

In the entire history of the Klotsche Center, the high school-ish gym where the UW-Milwaukee Panthers used to play and still work out, the combined number of media members who have ever set foot in the place probably didn’t add up to the horde that came to chronicle every movement and word of the NCAA Tournament’s latest sweetheart.

No one working a national angle ever beats a path to Downer and Hartford on Milwaukee’s fashionable east side, especially this time of year. And it’s probably a good bet that Roy Williams doesn’t have to dodge faculty members jogging on their lunch hour while he tries to conduct a news conference.

It just seemed so . . . surreal.

“That’s the word I’ve been using yesterday and this morning,” said Panthers forward Adrian Tigert. “It’s wild.”

Unfortunately, UWM is still being treated as something of a novelty act, even though its outright domination of Alabama and Boston College that earned a trip to the Sweet 16 demonstrated that the Panthers belong in the company of the nation’s best teams. Just as the questions about Pearl’s one-time appearance as the Eagle mascot before a BC game wouldn’t go away, neither will this older-than-Methuselah story about his involvement with Deon Thomas and the perception among some Flatlanders that Pearl is somehow more dangerous to western civilization than Ashton Kutcher.

OK, so maybe Pearl violated some Mafia-type code of silence among coaches about not ratting out the brotherhood.

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Bad judgment or integrity, right or wrong, it has no relevance in the context of Thursday’s game. And anyway, the story has been beaten over the years like a garden snake, except the snake you can eventually kill with a hoe.

Pearl’s actions as a 29-year-old Iowa assistant matter mostly to one group of people anymore, and that’s the 40-and-over Illini fans. There are better storylines, some of which actually have something to do with UWM’s quest to become the first 12th seed to beat a No. 1.

It’s really cool, for example, that Illinois coach Bruce Weber is a UWM graduate, a Milwaukee guy, a genuinely nice man who nevertheless accepted employment south of the border. And there’s no truth to the rumor that Weber put on the Panther suit during his undergrad days.

It is also topical that UWM baseball coach and former Brewers pitcher Jerry Augustine has a nephew who plays for the Illini, and that the Panthers will try to apply their press against Illinois because a team cannot go against its nature at this point in the game.

None of this means Pearl won’t–or shouldn’t–be booed Thursday, especially at the scalper prices some of those Illinois people are paying. But whatever happens, Pearl is prepared because nothing that will happen in Rosemont will be quite as Twilight Zone-y as what occurred Monday.