Orlando, Fla. ? Rumor has it that basketball was born in Springfield, Mass., in 1891 when Dr. James Naismith, a collegiate physical education instructor, implored his students to bounce a soccer ball, shoot it and land it in an elevated peach basket.

We know now that this is not true, and history must be rewritten. We know now that basketball had to have been invented in the state of Florida, where Naismith no doubt instructed his students to dribble that soccer ball through an obstacle course of lawn flamingos and shoot it into an orange crate.

First, the University of Florida won a school-first, state-first NCAA basketball championship two months ago. And now this: The Miami Heat win a franchise-first, state-first NBA championship Tuesday night with a 95-92 victory over the Dallas Mavericks.

Can you believe it? We Floridians are the honchos of the hardwood, the generals of the gymnasium. We are better than UCLA , Kentucky, Duke and Indiana. We are superior to the Lakers, Celtics, Mavs and Spurs.

How fitting that the Heat’s unheralded hero Tuesday night was home-grown Udonis Haslem, a former Gator who scored 17 points and pulled down 10 rebounds.

How fitting, too, that Tom Petty was used as the break music by ABC during the NBA playoffs. The Florida rocker might well have been thinking about the historical second-class stature of basketball in this state when he once sang, “You don’t have to live like a refugee.”

Time for a rewrite, T.P. In a span of two months, we’ve gone from a football-fanatical pigskin peninsula to a roundball-rabid hoops hotbed. We harbor the two most exciting and charismatic players in all of college and professional basketball – the Gators’ Joakim Noah and the Heat’s D. Wade.

Indiana likes to fancy itself as the basketball capital of the country. Not anymore. The Hoosiers and their “picket fence” may have been glorified on the silver screen, but the state of Florida plays barbed-wire basketball in real life.

It’s like Noah said after the Gators won the national title: “History doesn’t help you win basketball games.” No, it doesn’t. The only way to win a championship is to have the players and the plan. Billy Donovan recruited the right mix of players to do it at UF; Pat Riley acquired the right mix of players to do it with the Heat.

Let Mark Cuban and the Mavs whine about the officiating all they want.

And let the Hoosiers think they wrote the book on basketball. And let the Beantowners think they invented it.

We know better, don’t we?

Why do you think a basketball is the same color as an orange and not a peach?