A year ago, two, I would have been all over this.

The first San Bernardino County high school basketball team to advance to a state championship game.

That would be Eisenhower, of Rialto, a basketball power for most of the last 30 years but particularly effective under the guidance of coach Steve Johnson.

Eisenhower won the CIF Division II-A championship at the Honda Center in Anaheim on March 7, and then added the Southern California regional title on Saturday, defeating Loyola 68-62 at Pauley Pavilion.

My former paper, the San Bernardino Sun, had a reporter at the game, of course. But he appeared to have worked alone (if my perusal of sbsun.com is any indication).

Which tells us, anew, about the decline of print journalism in the area, and particularly in San Bernardino County. Even three years ago The Sun would have had at least two reporters at those title games. Maybe three. Plus a photographer. A game story, a notes package, a column, several photos. Minimum.

Now, the coverage is down to a single reporter (and no photos, that I saw), and given the dire straits the L.A. News Group is in, you have to wonder if they will be able to send a reporter to the state title game in Sacramento this coming Saturday. I hope so, for the sake of the community and the Eisenhower kids.

But back to Eisenhower. Steve Johnson is an outstanding coach who has labored just under the SoCal radar for most of his career. His teams would win 20-plus games year after year, then run into some power program from Orange County (Mater Dei, etc.) or Long Beach … one of the schools with shoe company hookups and top transfers coming in year after year … and lose in the semifinals, or thereabouts. And in the years they got into the state tournament, I’m not sure they ever survived the first game.

Johnson won with big teams (the 2001-02 team had four or five guys 6-6 or bigger, including future Boston College standout Sean Marshall, as well as starters Cory McJimson and Jonny Dukes), but he more often has won with smallish or even tiny teams, like this one.

Ike’s previous CIF title, in 2003 was accomplished with no one taller than Marshall, as I recall. And this team has no one taller than 6-4.

Johnson often decries a lack of size but it always seemed to me that he really preferred a more athletic small guy over a plodding big guy because he liked to has his guys run and harass and press you, defensively, and penetrate and kick out for three-pointers. Big guys often mean half-court games, and Steve Johnson could do that (the 2002 team got to the CIF Division I-AA title game), but he seemed more comfortable with the squirts.

Anyway, I probably saw Johnson-coached teams play 20 or 30 times during my time in the IE, and I can remember the respect his players had for him — even when he was shouting at them and going red in the face during timeouts. He is a good guy, working without some of the perks the bigger programs have, and his ability to produce good teams year after year probably hasn’t been sufficiently appreciated. It certainly didn’t hurt, this year, that Eisenhower is down to the Division II level, where the competition is tough but not insane, like it is in D1, where the Eagles used to live.

Is this the best team in San Bernardino County prep basketball history? Maybe. But I’d guess some of the earlier Ike teams were better, as well as one or two of the Fontana teams from the 1990s (Corey Benjamin, et al) or the San Bernardino teams from the late 1980s (Bryon Russell & Co.) — not to mention some of the Etiwanda teams of recent vintage, including the 2005 Etiwanda team that boasted Darren Collison (UCLA) and Jeff Pedergraft (Arizona State).

Good luck to Steve Johnson and the Eagles in the state title game. San Bernardino County would like to win one boys state basketball at some time in history, and this seems like a good time to do it.