So just how long has it been since the East Mississippi Community College women have been to the NJCAA National Basketball Tournament?

Well, the name of the school was still East Mississippi Junior College.

The team’s mascot was the Lionettes, and the school enrollment was 325.

Current EMCC head coach Sharon Thompson was in diapers. Hard-nosed freshman forward Martika Hull, pictured here, was still more than a decade away from being born.

I was 5 years old. For those trying to keep score at this point — my children are now 12 and 7.

It was 1978.

The Bee Gees were all over the music charts, Debby Boone was lighting up our lives, Lionel Richie was a Commodore and Meridian’s own Paul Davis — who just passed away 11 months ago — hit it big with “I Go Crazy.”

Jimmy Carter was President, gas was 63 cents a gallon and John Travolta was a megastar in “Grease” and “Saturday Night Fever.”

Mork and Mindy’s catch phrase was “Nanu Nanu” and the NBA champs were the Washington Bullets — long before the organization decided it was politically incorrect to be a Bullet.

It was certainly a simpler time. The top television shows were “Happy Days” and “Little House on the Prairie.” A comic strip by the name of “Garfield” made its debut.

And, among so many others, we lost Norman Rockwell and Mother Maybelle Carter. It’s no wonder times have changed …

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Times have certainly changed in the world of women’s basketball.

The WNBA, unlike so many other professional leagues for women who failed, is three years into its second decade of existence.

On Monday, a total of 10 SEC women’s teams earned postseason bids — seven of them to the NCAA Women’s Tournament — in what many considered a down season of sorts for the league.

No. 1 seeds in that same tourney include UConn, Duke, Oklahoma and Maryland. There’s no doubt the power in women’s basketball — like college sports in general — lies in the power conferences such as the SEC, ACC, Big 12, Big 10, Big East and Pac 10.

That certainly wasn’t the case in 1978.

Some of the same teams in this year’s tourney didn’t even field teams 31 years ago. Small schools and junior colleges were just as good — and in many instances, much better — than today’s powerhouse programs.

Delta State, for example, won AIWA national championships in 1975, 1976 and 1977 (the NCAA didn’t break schools into Division I, II and III until 1982).

And just up the road in Scooba, the Lady Lions … err, Lionettes, had a powerhouse of a team coached by Richard Mathis — who is now the men’s coach and athletic director at Pearl River Community College in Poplarville.

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Mathis’ team had gone 18-8 the year before and returned three starters: Rendia Bennett of Montpelier, Annie Dale of East Kemper and Jessie Mae Brown: A 6-foot-2, All-American from East Kemper.

In fact, in a 1978 story in this same newspaper, Mathis said it was Brown’s presence that led to a stellar recruiting year for the program and a historical season which took the team all the way to the national finals.

“What made Scooba a winning program was not me … but Jessie Brown deciding to come here,” Mathis said 31 years ago. “Once she was here, other good players decided to come.”

Among those who came were Rita Higginbotham — a legend in her own right in Noxubee County who had prepped at tiny Nanih Waiya; Deborah Stancil, Sandy Caldwell (Gardner) and Kay Pierce of Class A third-place finisher West Lauderdale; Bettye Simonds of Noxubee County, which made the Class AA state tourney; Judy Deason of New Hope; Annie Cross of East Kemper; Cora Wilkins of West Kemper; and Diane Eaton of Montpelier.

“Judy Deason had a chance to go to South Alabama, but she decided to come here because her sister played here,” Mathis said. “Stancil and Higginbotham were just overlooked by the four-year schools and I’m so glad they were.

“A lot of them could have gone anywhere, and some of them came because they lived just down the road.”

Higginbotham, Pierce and Stancil eventually joined Brown in the starting lineup — with the other spot often alternating among Deason, Caldwell, Dale and Bennett in a rotation which gave EMJC plenty of depth.

Stancil averaged better than 13 points per game, while Higginbotham and Pierce netted around 10 apiece. Brown? She took feed after feed from Higginbotham and scored at will — averaging 26 points and 16 rebounds as the team marched to a region title with a 28-0 record.

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So how much of a folk hero is Jessie Mae Brown?

Well, in 1978, folks around Scooba Tech labeled her “The Franchise” — a quarter-century before the term became synonymous with the designation of big stars for professional teams.

As a junior and senior at East Kemper, Brown played for Charles Jackson and the Lady Hornets finished as back-to-back state runner-ups.

“We absolutely should have won the championship,” Jackson said earlier this week, and Brown emphatically agreed.

East Kemper later consolidated with West Kemper to form what is now Kemper County High School, and in 1992, Jackson led the boys’ team to the school’s only state championship when the Wildcats won the Class 3A state title.

Lewis Brown, the first born of Jessie Mae, was a youngster in Jackson’s program at the time.

Earlier this month, when the Kemper County boys made a run to the Class 2A State Tournament semifinals, they were sparked in part by a razor-thin, 6-foot-7 freshman named Devonta Pollard — who is the youngest of Jessie Mae’s two children and not yet half the age of his older brother.

I suppose I could go through the whole six degrees of separation concept at this point — but I just feel like I’d leave way too many names out.

But you should know that Pollard’s coach at KCHS, Jerry Byrd, is also an East Kemper product who played on a state runner-up team featuring Charles Jones and coached by William Taylor.

Three decades later, Taylor is now the athletic director at Kemper County. His wife, Martha, by the way, retired in 2006 after teaching English at EMCC for 25 years.

And certainly, you’ve heard of Jones. He helped Louisville and coach Denny Crum to a pair of Final Fours and played in the NBA for Phoenix, Portland and Washington. He’s now a Louisville police officer.

Jones’ sister, Patricia, by the way, was a teammate of Brown’s and a fellow all-star at East Kemper.

Jessie Brown originally signed with Jackson State before she wound up staying in Kemper County at EMJC. She got plenty of recruiting attention at Scooba Tech and went to Delta State to play for legendary coach Margaret Wade, and Brown was an All-Region selection as a junior.

But Wade retired, and Brown eventually transferred to South Alabama to finish her college career. She was the fourth pick overall in the Women’s Basketball League by the Chicago Hustle.

“But the team folded not long after I went to Chicago,” Brown said. “So I came home and started working at East Kemper Elementary.”

Brown has frequented Chicago recently because her husband, Irvin, is a cancer patient. They head back to the Windy City on March 30.

Earlier this week, however, she was in Meridian — on her way to pick up Devonta from AAU basketball practice. Pollard is in his third year of playing on the AAU circuit, and with the chance to add to his 6-7 frame, his legacy — and stature — seems obvious.

“He’s taller than all of us already,” Jessie Mae joked Tuesday. “His dad is only about 5-10, but I do have an older cousin in Witchita, Kansas, on my mom’s side that’s about 6-11.”

Just for coincidental kicks, I have to add this: When the Chicago Hustle — which led the WBL in attendance all three seasons of its existence — folded in 1981, the entire league shut down. Leo Grobstein, who did the radio for the Hustle way back when, now does the radio for the WNBA’s Chicago Sky. Donna Orender, now the WNBA president, played for the Hustle in 1980 and — if only on paper — was temporarily one of Brown’s teammates.

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EMJC’s ladies blitzed through their first three games of the 1978 national tournament, and as expected, met up with defending national champ Panola (Texas) Junior College in the championship.

That’s where the Lionettes’ 31-game winning streak and national title hopes ended, however, as Panola left with a 67-63 win that without a doubt doesn’t sit well with Brown — even 31 years later.

She averaged an amazing 30.3 points per game during the tournament — a 4-game record which still stands in the NJCAA record books.

Higginbotham went on to a stellar career at what is now the University of West Alabama — averaging more than 12 points and 7 assists during her two years there. She was the first female ever inducted into the UWA Hall of Fame and was a softball stud for the Lady Tigers, as well.

She later coached softball at Mississippi University for Women, won a Gulf South Conference championship there in 1994 and now heads up MUW’s intramural sports programs.

Stancil also went to UWA, averaged 17.7 points per game and was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame in 2004.

Among the rest of the group, there are teachers, a nurse, a postal worker and a bank president. Nearly all of them are still around these parts; many still have some connection to the college. For example: Caldwell’s son, Ricky Gardner, is a sophomore pitcher for the EMCC baseball team.

Only one is no longer with us, as Wilkins lost a battle with cancer.

“Cora passed of cancer a few years ago,” Brown said. “But most of the rest of us are around. Most of us have our health … I’ve got a lot of their contacts in my phone.”

Mathis, meanwhile, joked in the 1978 Meridian Star story that while the team’s success had to help with recruiting “no one has been knocking down my door to hire me away from here.” He went on to say he’d like to coach both the men and women.

The next year, he did take over the men’s program and Wayne Byrd — Jerry Byrd’s father and the current girls coach at Neshoba Central — took over the EMJC ladies.

Mathis eventually wound up at Pearl River, and this past season, earned his 650th career coaching victory.

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To understand where women’s basketball was in 1978, understand this: Mississippi State and Ole Miss didn’t play until the 1974-75 season; Southern Miss not until 1975-76.

Even Delta State, with all its prominence, had only reinstated the sport in 1972.

Wade — dubbed “The Mother of Modern Women’s College Basketball” — was a player at DSU when the school disbanded its program in 1932 because “administration thought the game was too tough for young ladies.”

Devastated, she turned to coaching and built a legendary program at Cleveland High School in the Delta. She’d been away from coaching for 14 years when Delta State called her in 1972.

In Wade’s first season back, the Lady Statesmen went 16-2. They played Memphis twice; and the rest of the schedule was against Mississippi schools only — the likes of MUW, Mississippi College, Blue Mountain and even some of the junior colleges.

In her first four years back, they went 109-6. Behind all-world Lusia Harris, Delta State and Wade won three straight national titles from 1975-77.

Just how dominant was DSU against the “big” schools? During the 1975-76 season, the Lady Statesmen opened the season by hammering MSU (119-47) and Southern Miss (111-44) before later whipping Ole Miss 91-63.

In fact, Delta State’s all-time record against those three schools is 49-24, with many of the losses coming much later in the series.

Brown never got to play with or against Harris — with whom she so often drew comparisons — but she did play the 1979 season under Wade, who then retired and was later inducted into the National Basketball Hall of Fame with an .872 winning percentage.

That same year, in 1979, Van Chancellor — he of the Houston Comets and U.S. Olympic fame — arrived at Ole Miss and the balance of power slowly began to shift.

And for all of you six degrees fans: Laticia Mathis, the daughter of Richard Mathis, played for Van Chancellor at Ole Miss in the mid-1990s.

•••

Right around noon today, at the 7,000-seat Bicentennial Center in Salina, Kansas — EMCC will take the floor in a national tournament game for the first time in 31 years when the Lady Lions face an undefeated and third-ranked Walters State team.

Believe me when I tell you the Lady Lions will be heavy underdogs — not only today but in every game they play while they’re in Kansas. They’re seeded 12th among the 16 teams in the national tourney, and many of the other teams there are regular visitors.

The fact that Thompson, the coach whom I previously mentioned was in diapers back in 1978, has guided her team there is of no big surprise to me, however.

Sometime around the Christmas holidays during the 1993-94 high school basketball seasons, I fielded a phone call from Sumter County, Ala., coach Alonzo Sledge — who was trying to drum up a little exposure for one of his players.

“I’ve got a girl over here who can play,” I remember Sledge saying. “She can score and rebound like nobody we’ve ever had. She can bring the ball up if we need her to … she can do it all. She’s probably averaging a triple-double.”

That player was Sharon Thompson, who headed up The Meridian Star’s All-Area Team back in 1994 and then signed with Mississippi State.

She made the All-SEC Freshman Team in 1995 and was all-conference in 1996. She scored in double figures all four years — 12.8 as a freshman and 16.8 as a senior, after which she was drafted in the first round by the San Jose Lasers of the now-defunct American Basketball League.

Thompson is fifth on the school’s all-time scoring list; second only to All-American LaToya Thomas in all-time rebounds; third in blocked shots and ranks in the top 10 in at least a half-dozen other statistical categories.

And she did all that despite going up against much larger players. Thompson does stand 5-foot-11, but if you’ve never met her — she appears so delicate a decent gust of wind might blow her over.

I say appear, because Thompson is anything but delicate when it comes to basketball. A tough and fierce competitor with a no-quit attitude, she led MSU in rebounding all four of her seasons; led three times in blocked shots; and led the team in charges taken.

Just how worried was Thompson about her team facing a Walters’ squad today which sports a 30-0 record with 25 double-digit wins?

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “I don’t worry about the teams we play. I worry about if we’re going to show up … It could be us that was undefeated and go up there and lose.”

•••

Thompson has raved this season about the toughness of Hull — the former Southeast Lauderdale star who leads the team with eight double-doubles despite standing just 5-foot-10.

Of course, dominating bigger players is nothing new for Hull. When she helped SEL to the 2008 Class 3A state title, she consistently whipped 6-1 and 6-3 opponents in the paint.

That desire and toughness — which certainly mirrors her coach — has on more than one occasion prompted Thompson to call Hull “just a good ole tough country girl.”

In fact, this entire EMCC team — sans perhaps Atlanta native and leading scorer Angelique Burtts — with hometowns like Porterville, Macon and Heidelberg, could be labeled a bunch of country girls.

Just like Thompson. And just like that bunch in 1978 that went 31-0 before losing in the national finals.

“It’s all really something else … but you are exactly right,” Jessie Mae Brown said Tuesday. “We were absolutely just a bunch of ole country girls.”