WICHITA, Kan. — Bennett Stirtz saw the bright lights and the cameras, waiting on college basketball’s new star, and shot a look at Drake’s sports information director.

“I’ve got to do this?” Stirtz asked.

“Yes.”

Watching from nearby was Stirtz’s dad, wearing the same crew cut as the son he coached into a clinical playmaker on the court. No nerves. Few mistakes. Roger Stirtz laughed when asked about a moment when his son flashed a rare on-court smile, a few minutes into Drake’s 67-57 win against No. 6 seed Missouri Thursday night. How often does Bennett show actual emotion on the floor?

“Maybe once,” Roger said, recalling the buzzer beater Bennett hit back in December to beat Kansas State, the team he grew up rooting for. Then, he offered that same self-assured grin. “He’s started to loosen up a little bit.”

And Bennett can’t duck the spotlight any longer.

The entire country knows now that Stirtz is one of the best guards in college basketball, after he scored 21 points in his Division I NCAA Tournament debut, on a night when Missouri double-teamed him almost every time he touched the ball. They saw the running 3 off one foot to beat the shot clock and the soft floater in the lane to regain control when Mizzou seemed on the verge of the best comeback of the day, cutting a 15-point deficit to one with under five minutes left.

Now, Division I knows what D-II schools have known for a while: It’s really hard to beat a Ben McCollum-coached team in March, especially when he’s got a great point guard. This win continues a script that remains almost too good to be true.

Stirtz, from Liberty, Mo., was never recruited by the big state school in Columbia and struck out on D-I scholarship offers in high school. He and three other Drake starters began their college careers at Northwest Missouri State, the D-II school where McCollum built a juggernaut over 15 years, winning four Division II national titles. Stirtz was one of seven players from the state of Missouri who scored on Thursday night for the Bulldogs. None of the others ever got a sniff from the Tigers, either.

“They shouldn’t have,” McCollum said. “Coming out of high school, they shouldn’t have. Sometimes kids just develop. When they stick with the right system, they develop the right way.”

McCollum brought up his former guard Trevor Hudgins, who spent time with the Houston Rockets and now stars in France’s top professional league but wasn’t good enough for Kansas State as a high school senior in Manhattan, Kan.

“But then he developed,” McCollum said, “and made himself better and better.”

More importantly, Hudgins stayed out of the transfer portal and finished his career at Northwest Missouri State. McCollum always wanted to give players like that a shot to prove themselves against the best.

McCollum tried “all of the time” at Northwest Missouri State to schedule a preseason game against the Tigers. He eventually gave up — let it be noted he never asked current head coach Dennis Gates — accepting that it wouldn’t happen for the same reason Duke had discontinued its practice of playing the defending D-II national champ: McCollum’s teams got too good. (Duke nearly lost to the Bearcats in 2019, surviving 27 points from Hudgins in a 69-63 win.)

McCollum waited for the right opportunity to test what he’d built on college basketball’s biggest stage. Before he got the Drake job last spring, he had asked Stirtz and two other starters if they would follow him. A fourth, Mitch Mascari, eventually joined.

Soon, he was flooded with messages from a group text thread of his best friends, sharing social media posts doubting McCollum. The most common theme: Why was McCollum bringing his Division II players — four of them! — with him to Drake?

“We’ve got some receipts,” McCollum said. “I think that’s what all competitors do. I just think they like to be doubted. It forces them to trust themselves even more, immerse themselves even more to the D-II Drake deal.”

McCollum’s players followed without hesitation. They knew they would win because that’s simply all they’ve known.

Stirtz paused as Mascari walked by for confirmation: “Like 15 championships?”

“I don’t know,” Mascari shot back. “Too many to count.”

“You’re taking winners to the next level, and all they’re used to doing is winning,” Roger Stirtz said. “And so you just have to raise your game a little bit. And the recipe is still the same.”

So, too, is the coach. McCollum has not adjusted his winning formula for his new level. Drake’s preparation this week wasn’t any different than what Northwest Missouri State did for Division II tournament play.

“Super focused, intentional,” McCollum’s wife Michelle said. “Just all day long he’s watching film and just preparing and just being Ben.”

This week, McCollum decided his scout team would not take the ball out of bounds after made baskets, trying to prepare the Bulldogs for the tempo they were about to face. The key was to limit live-ball turnovers and set their defense. Missouri, which averaged 90.6 points over the final eight games of the regular season, is used to playing fast and shooting early in the shot clock. Drake plays at the slowest tempo in D-I, the only team to average fewer than 60 possessions per game.

“Part of our tempo is our defense,” McCollum said. “We’re not afraid to guard you for 30 seconds. That doesn’t bother us. And so once you get deeper in possessions, most percentages go down. Ours goes up actually. Most other people’s goes down.”

In the first half, the Tigers stayed patient, but the open looks rarely came, and they scored a season-low 23 points. In the second half, the Tigers tried to drop their heads and get to the rim, but Drake had set up a wall inside that proved tough to break through. It took Mizzou nearly eight minutes to score its first field goal after halftime.

The Bulldogs felt the jitters of playing in their first D-I NCAA Tournament game. Abreu air-balled a free throw (part of a ghastly 12-for-24 night at the line as a team), and several passes flew out of bounds. But Stirtz helped Drake build a seven-point first-half lead by going to work late in the shot clock.

He scored several times after a ball screen, knowing that Missouri’s defenders were going to aggressively hedge, giving him an angle if he just went the opposite way.

“If this is what they do all game,” Stirtz remembered thinking when he scored the layup that prompted the grin, “it’s going to be a fun one.”

When Missouri changed tactics and threw a second defender at Stirtz anytime he had the ball, McCollum adjusted too, putting Stirtz on the left wing and having him find a guard near the top of the key for a ball screen on which the roll would be open because the Tigers weren’t going to leave Stirtz. That helped Drake big men Tavion Banks and Cam Manyawu combine for 22 points.

And the ball eventually re-found Stirtz late when the Bulldogs needed him. Down the stretch, Drake finally loosened up and made layup after layup against Mizzou’s pressing defense, with Stirtz delivering the passes to put the game out of reach.

“He’s a good player,” McCollum said, flashing his own smile.

From a 13-0 start that included three wins over high-major programs to Missouri Valley regular season and postseason titles to a run past the first round of the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1971, Drake’s season has become quite the story. Next up is a meeting with Texas Tech and Grant McCasland, who just so happens to be one of McCollum’s best friends.

“Honestly, it feels like we’re in a dream,” Michelle said, watching her husband go through the handshake line after winning his first (Division I) NCAA Tournament game. “We watched this on TV for years and here we are. It’s like, is this real?”

Yes. And the cameras are waiting.