The guys at Caltech are conditioned to think in terms of big numbers, but this was getting ridiculous.

Caltech, one of the world’s leading mathematics and science schools (if not the leading), finally won a conference basketball game today, 46-45 at home over Occidental.

The victory snapped a 310-game losing streak in Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference play, a slide that went back to a victory over La Verne in 1985.

You can watch a video clip of the celebration here, though it seems somehow telling that the videographer didn’t bother to include the winning free throw by Ryan Elmquist, just the one he missed that allowed the clock to run out.

I always wanted to be there when Caltech finally won. I almost was, back in 2008, in what was one of the last events I covered in another journalism lifetime.

What had caught my attention, almost exactly three years ago, was when Caltech took the University of Redlands to overtime before losing, in an SCIAC game. The Redlands coach, Jim Ducey, said, back then, “Somebody is going to get beat by them. We’re glad it wasn’t us.”

I remember examining what was left of the Caltech schedule that season, and their last home game was against La Verne, which hadn’t destroyed them in a game played at La Verne. So I went to see Caltech play on a night of February 17, the first and only time I have been on the grounds of the famous Pasadena campus, and almost saw some history.

Caltech had four semi-decent players, as I recall.  One of them was dragging around a bad knee. They had some size, though, and they were not horrible. A few of their guys had even been starters on their high school teams.

The coach at the time was a guy named Roy Dow, and he had been the man who led Caltech to its first victory — of any sort — after 207 consecutive defeats in a victory over Bard College in January of 2007.

As often was the case during Caltech’s long travels in the wildnerness, the coach seemed to care more about wins and losses than did the team. Dow was a very bright guy, but he wasn’t Caltech undergrad bright. He was a coach, and coaches hate losing. His guys were mostly egghead students who played basketball in the margins of attending one of the most academically rigorous schools in the world.

As I said, they had a couple of good players. Brian Hires and Travis Haussler were the best. Good size (6-5, 6-6, which is plenty big in the SCIAC) and they had some skills. And the team had a young guy, about 6-6, who had lots of potential. None other than the freshman Ryan Elmquist, who would still be there as a senior under a new coach (Oliver Eslinger) when the streak was finally snapped.

Overall, though, Caltech’s team was mostly nerds straight out of the physics lab. You’ve seen the CBS comedy “The Big Bang Theory”? The one in which the protagonists all work at Caltech? Well, imagine a couple of decent athletes pretty much surrounded by Sheldon Cooper, Hofstadter, Wolowitz and Koothrappali, and you’ve got an idea of Caltech’s bench, the bulk of the team.

The game I saw, three years ago, also went to overtime, like the Redlands game. I never actually thought Caltech could win, although I certainly wanted them to, but they kept hanging around, and the crowd of about 150 was actually very into the game. Then one of Caltech’s key guys fouled out (I seem to recall it being Elmquist), and they ran out of gas and lost 80-74.

After the game I talked to Paxon Frady, a senior point guard from South Carolina and the guy with the bum knee,  and he talked about the frustration of losing every game for four years. But like the other kids there, school really did come first for him, and he told me his class schedule, which was just flat intimidating, and his studies and hopes for his career enabled him to keep it all in perspective.

Coach Dow was more than polite, taking me upstairs to his office to chat after the game. He was sick and tired of “geniuses can’t solve losing streak” stories, but I let him know I was writing more of a “they are getting so close they can taste it now” sort of thing, and that chilled him out.

His main complaint at the time was the school not allowing geniuses who happened to play basketball into the school. Nobody is dumb at a place like Caltech, but when you get down to the “bottom” 25 percent of the class you’re picking from a fairly large group of kids, and the administration was refusing to budge on its policy of never taking into account if one of those kids from a pool of people with similar academic credentials just happened to play basketball. Dow’s take was that the school wouldn’t hurt its academic standing in the slightest if it allowed a couple of players into the school, but the school was going backwards on the issue.

I seem to recall (and I keep writing “recall” because I can find no record, online, of the column I did) … that the school had been giving the basketball program, like, two genius hoops players per year, but then decided that was against their pure pursuit of knowledge, and it had become a random event, turning into “would admissions actually pick one or two of the guys Dow had identified?”

He left after that season, and I don’t know if he quit (more likely) or was fired, and he was replaced by an MIT assistant, Eslinger, and it’s not like the new guy just marched straight out and won an SCIAC game right off. And, in fact, the winning free throw was scored by one of Dow’s guys, Elmquist.

When we were done speaking, Dow offered me a Caltech T-shirt. Just picked it up out of a big box on the floor of his office. I accepted it, thinking a box of T-shirts from a tournament already over didn’t have great value. I still have that T-shirt, and took it to Hong Kong and now to Abu Dhabi. It’s really cool. It’s gray, but it has images in orange (basketballs as suns) and white (names of teams in a Caltech-sponsored tournament), and the whole thing is superimposed on a picture from goodness knows when of three Caltech founders — the astronomer George Ellery Hale, physicist Robert Andrew Millikan and chemist Arthur Amos Noyes, fondly known as “Thinker, Tinker and Stinker” … and the tournament was known as the “2007 Caltech “thinker, tinker and stinker” Classic. (Which Caltech didn’t win, unfortunately, but I sill love the T-shirt.)

Anyway, good for Caltech. In this Bill Plaschke column he mentions how the school president and a Nobel laureate were among those who rushed the court. Not something you will see at USC.

I will wear my “thinker, tinker and stinker” T-shirt this week in their honor.