To hear us tell it, he shoulder-yoked that team across the fields til up tilled a banner, vast ivory grin gleaming even through the last, half-crippled row. Flint’s prodigal pulse, once a Wolverine recruit, now middle-namesake of his coach’s only son. The face, mind, and engine of a team, time, and program laced in lore. Paragon of all the virtues befitting a collegiate star — at least as far as the cameras could see. When Spartans think of March, they think first and fondest of him, joy-hopping on a mangled ankle, crying in time with “One Shining Moment,” reaper of the righteously sowed.

To hear a 24-year-old woman tell it, he drove her to a cheap motel, assaulted her, and held her against her will. After a charity golf outing, after drinks at an area bar, after her boyfriend left to give his friend a lift, after she thought he’d be taking her back to the golf club, rescued only after knocking on a nearby room. When she thinks of him, the mind will try and recoil, to a time before she got in the car. Before the monster reared his head.

In the coming weeks and months, these polar narratives surrounding Mateen Cleaves — Michigan State icon, criminal predator — will begin to crystalize. That’s a matter apart from finding their equilibrium, of course, as if the big-T-truth of Cleaves’ ultimate nature invariably lay between. Once facts are brought to light, once justice lowers down the weight, shades of gray almost always fade away.

At this point, gray may be the best-case scenario for Cleaves, arraigned Wednesday morning on multiple counts of aggravated sexual assault, carrying a possible maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. His attorney, predictably, has called the allegations “outrageous,” pleading the public reserve judgment on the 39-year-old former player and current analyst “until all the facts are presented.”

That I cheer for Cleaves’ former team, or saw him as the living mascot embodiment of Tom Izzo’s balls-and-bootstraps ethos, ought not and should not preclude giving this woman a full and faithful benefit of the doubt. Statistics, and the moral imperative therein, demand at least that much.

But nor can I recall, through the cringe-too-many such stories screamed from upper folds, ever wanting it so badly to be a lie. Ever hoping it was all some sorry scam. Ever retching knowing how weirdly wrong it feels to heed that hope at all, or considering what wishing one man’s innocence says about our souls.

A bittersweet 16 years after Cleaves and Co.’s magical run, Denzel Valentine is readying yet another Spartan march to April. Like those legendary Flintstones (Cleaves, Morris Peterson, and Charlie Bell all hail from the besieged city), Valentine’s is as close-knit and kinetic a squad as any Izzo’s had. There’s a sense of purpose about them, measured yet exacting, like a lighthouse in a gale. At the lamp stands Valentine, surveying the stormy swells and guiding the far-flung clippers to shore. Every ship in the proper slip, every decision made, it seems, two gusts ahead of the wind.

Unlike their halcyon brethren, these Spartans were never expected to contend. It was supposed to be a rebuilding year, the serviceable bridge between last year’s unlikely Final Four run and a top-three 2016 recruiting class. The 2000 title team, meanwhile, was returning four starters from the previous season, when they bulldozed their way to the program’s first Final Four appearance since Magic Johnson’s transcendent title run two decades earlier.

Twenty to 25 wins, Valentine All-B1G nod, a Sweet 16 exit at the hands of a Kansas or North Carolina — that, had you asked a State fan six months ago, would’ve been success enough. Now, buttressed by one of the nation’s most formidably balanced attacks, a potential Wooden winner at the helm, anything less than a title will, for these Spartans, be an opportunity squandered.

There are worse positions to be in, of course — writing legacies where those before have long since left a canon. Even if Final Four glory somehow escapes this senior trio (Valentine, two-year transfer and former prep teammate Bryn Forbes, and four-year glue dude Matt Costello), the templates they laid — exploded projections, an offense beyond Izzo’s typical break-and-grind siege — will have been more than worth their weight in rafter cloth.

Only, suddenly, the stakes are somehow higher. With Cleaves’ character suspended in heated air, the sheen of that 2000 team can’t help but begin to dim. The qualities he exuded — toughness, smarts, an enthusiasm unbridled and unrivaled — betraying the licentiousness beneath. To behold him, now, we can’t help but think of the victim, wondering whether it was that very worship, heaping and constant, which fed this, our evilest of appetites. To behold the banner, now, in our minds, one is guilt-inclined to stitch it with an asterisk, black as a coal shaft and twice as deep, to assure our memories are something less than fond.

For Izzo and Valentine, this year is as much about rewriting history and trumping old glories as matching or amending them. Fair or not, 2000 will be viewed by many as damaged goods, marshaled as the whole march was by a guard, a star, an icon for whom those titles — the wins as well as the words — now feel like the falsest of idols.

It is, for sure, a stinging feeling waxing on something shrouded in so many unknowns. Akin to jamming a poly-sided tragedy into your own psychic-circular hole. That it took six months to file official charges suggests prosecutors sought to make their case as ironclad as possible — knowing the icon in the crosshairs, knowing the seismic fallout to follow.

Cleaves, for his part, has since released the following statement:

I read that and pray against heaven it’s the case. In part because the alternative is true far too often, and what manner of shitty world that makes us; in part because I don’t want the Mateen Cleaves myth toppled from the pillars; in part because it’s easier to wish for lies than accept the terrible truth.

Should hope prove futile, I want — as ought we all — some justice be served. For this, rescinding our long-ago highs would be the least we could do, that the odds of another like attack might be winnowed by a billionth. If it means one less predator plies his trade, we can grasp the grips of having lauded one in waiting.

This only makes these Spartans, this March, that much more important. They’ve never had a star, since Cleaves, this part and parcel with their mettle. They’ve never had a leader, since Cleaves, capable of bending the game to his will. And they’ve never had a bellwether, since Cleaves, better suited for the climb.

Scarce few heroes are meant to last. Sometimes the thread’s self-unwound, others by time itself. Teams, meanwhile, only live so long on another’s bygone triumphs before the faithful come to clamor for more. Such is where these Spartans find themselves, now, on the eve of yet another run: Feeding off a dying star, while the next — white hot and forming ever faster — summons heat enough to hang his own.