If you had told me, when I left the Inland Empire in 2008, that a high school basketball team from that area would be ranked No. 1 in the country within a decade …

I probably would have laughed at the idea.

And if pushed to declare which school might have become nationally relevant in boys bkb, it would not have been Chino Hills High School.

But such are the demographic changes in the region, and such is the talent of one particular family whose sons are attending Chino Hills, that the public school’s hoops team was the consensus “best in the country” choice after going 35-0 during the 2015-16 season.

Then, as now, Chino Hills is powered by the Ball Boys.

Last year, it was eldest son Lonzo, who averaged a triple double (23.9 ppg, 11.3 rpg, 11.5 apg) in 32-minute games and was the USA Today, Naismith and MaxPreps player of the year.

With Lonzo Ball now tearing it up at UCLA, which is 10-0 and ranked No. 2 in the nation (with a victory over Kentucky), it is up to younger brothers LaMelo and LiAngelo to carry the load at Chino Hills, and so far they are doing fine.

LaMelo is a slender sophomore point guard who runs the offense and seems to have Stephen Curry-caliber shooting range. LiAngelo is a bulkier 6-foot-5  senior guard with a nice inside/outside game.

Like their older brother, they have committed to UCLA, where they could form three-fifths of a Bruins starting lineup in 2019-20 — if the older brothers are not already in the NBA, and Lonzo almost certainly will be, despite concerns about his defense and ballhandling.

Chino Hills has extended its winning streak to 44 games with a 9-0 start, and the Huskies appear to have enough talent around the Ball duo that they could finish atop the national rankings again. At the moment, they are ranked No. 6 in the country.

This would have been highly unlikely a few years ago mostly because the deck would have been stacked against a public school.

The best basketball teams in most U.S. states for the past 30 years, at least, have tended to come from private (often parochial) schools, like Jersey City Saint Anthony, or from small, for-profit academies, such as Oak Hill Academy in Maryland.

Public schools were stuck with rules that made it more difficult to build overpowering teams — rules against recruiting, rules against transferring, and so on.

Also, the public schools playing the best basketball almost always came from the inner city. (In California, Dominguez Hills and Long Beach Poly are prominent examples.)

In no way is Chino Hills an inner-city school.

It was opened in 2001 in the rolling hills of upper-middle-class Chino that was being built up with pricey, family-size homes.

Historically, Chino had a dairy-based economy and a significant ethnic Dutch population. The city’s first school, Chino, was often pretty good, but not to the point of getting national attention.

That fell, first, to Chino Don Lugo which produced probably the best female player in the history of the planet, in Diana Taurasi, and 15 years later it was Chino Hills, the new school in the district, that won the boys state title and was voted national champion.

Much of it is due to the family Ball, as has been often noted.

Their father, Lavar Ball, decided he would have his three sons attend the local public school, which was still new and a bit shiny, as well as ethnically diverse and well-funded … and the success of his sons and the rest of the Chino Hills team has brought the school lots of attention.

The family decided it could get whatever it needed, athletically and academically, right there in their neighborhood, escaping the often lengthy commutes to private schools with leading programs.

Perhaps we could have seen that coming, back in 2008, but probably not, considering it hinged on one father deciding the neighborhood high school was good enough for his sons.

I certainly did not anticipate that, and from afar I marvel that it has happened.