I’ve been a basketball junkie for more than 40 years but had never come across this incredible story until it popped up as a narrative detour in “The Real Hoosiers: Crispus Attucks High School, Oscar Robertson and the Hidden History of Hoops,” by Jack McCallum, one of two terrific new basketball books out in time to make your tourney banter that much more intelligent. “The Real Hoosiers” is the story of a dominant but unheralded high school team that played during the same placid Eisenhower days as the squad in the beloved movie “Hoosiers.” The Crispus Attucks Tigers, led by one of the best to ever do it, Oscar Robertson, won a state title in 1955, becoming the first all-Black team in Indiana — and “quite likely,” in McCallum’s estimation, the United States — to do that. (They won it again the following year.)

In 1954, Attucks lost in the state tournament to Milan High School, the rural team that inspired the fictional Hickory High in “Hoosiers.” McCallum uses that film, and the racial dynamics of its conservative “Behold, the smart, scrappy white kids!” ethos as a jumping-off point for how much more improbable the Tigers’s real-world heroics were. For starters, they didn’t have a gym. They also dealt with consistently biased officiating, racist invective from opposing fans, restaurants that wouldn’t serve them, bigoted newspaper columnists, death threats and the murder of peer Emmett Till.

McCallum makes quick work of the movie’s legacy to tell a much deeper and richer story about life under de facto legal segregation in 1950s Indiana. The “most northern state in the South,” as it’s been called, was home to the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan, which is why the book goes well beyond simply resuscitating those Crispus Attucks Tigers and giving them their just due. “The Real Hoosiers” has a real edge to it.

McCallum, now in his mid-70s, pulls all the tricks from a Hall of Fame career out of his righteous writer’s bag to show what these teenagers endured while compiling an 85-6 record in Robertson’s three varsity seasons. He jumps back and forth in time, throws in fun footnotes about figures like Cab Calloway and Kurt Vonnegut, weaves in historical antecedents and ancillary tales, offers technical basketball analysis, and breaks the fourth wall with commentary and jokes, both grandpa groaners and one-liners dripping with animus at racial injustices past and present.

Nowhere is that animus felt more than in a chapter titled “Basketball and Blood in the Same Town Square.” In 1926, 90 miles north of Indianapolis in Marion, Ind., the town square hosted a party after the local boys beat Martinsville (whose team featured a sophomore guard named John Wooden; hold that thought) for the state title. A raucous bonfire raged all night. Four years later, a crowd of 5,000 — a quarter of Marion’s population — gathered once again for a different purpose. This time, as McCallum describes it, “They were waiting — many of them hoping — to witness their first lynching.”