What will come next for the Sprint Center?

When I was a kid, I always wanted to know what we were going to do tomorrow. This used to drive my parents crazy. We’d be at an amusement park or having a picnic at Round-Up Lake or on our family vacation at some educational place like Gettysburg, and I’d inevitably say those words: “This is fine, but what are we going to do tomorrow?”

Today, the Big 12 championship game will be at the Sprint Center — Kansas vs. Texas for the third straight year — and it will be a wonderful scene. Kansas City is back. Downtown will be electric. The early version of the Power & Light District will be hopping. The arena will be packed, the basketball intense, the sound deafening. Kansas City is the epicenter of the Midwestern sport scene again, and it’s great.

But I can’t help but wonder, what are we going to do tomorrow?

Where the heck is our NBA or NHL team anyway?

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There are seven cars in the Kemper Arena parking lot, though one looks like it may have been abandoned here sometime in the early 1970s. Nobody walks around. The streets all around are lifeless. The only sign of movement here comes from a message board hanging over the entrance; it blares upcoming Kemper Arena events in red LED letters. The Pet Expo is coming. So is Dave Ramsey’s total money makeover.

The sign flashes to no one: “Welcome Big 12 Fans!”

I’ve been thinking about Kemper Arena a lot this Big 12 tournament week — I still have a soft spot in my heart for this place. This place was built on big dreams. And most of those dreams came true. For 20 straight years, the Big Eight basketball tournaments played here at Kemper; the first six Big 12 basketball tournaments played here, too. This is where Danny and the Miracles played (not to mention Paul McCartney and Wings). This is where Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan fought and scrapped for the Republican nomination for president.

And, yes, this is also where the Kings played NBA hoops, where the Scouts played something resembling NHL hockey — for a time in the 1970s, of course, Kansas City was one of only a handful of cities with all four major-league sports. This is where, for a time, indoor soccer was actually a major happening in town. A lot of amazing things happened in this place, before and after the roof caved in. This is where Kansas City, in so many ways, felt most alive.

“I can’t tell you just how big Kansas City felt,” says a friend of mine who grew up in a small place and used to come with her parents to the Big Eight tournament. “It sounds silly now, but it was like New York to us.”

Four years ago, Kansas City took another shot. With Kemper Arena ready for retirement and with a lot of people in town ready to make something big happen, Kansas City passed a hotel and rental car tax that built the Sprint Center. Now that’s up, encased in glass, utterly unique. It’s beautiful. Across the street, the Power & Light District is coming alive — you can already get a feel for how much fun that’s going to be.

And all week, Kansas City has felt alive again. The Big 12 is back! It has been wonderful, every bit of it, even the heavy traffic which tells you, hey, you are someplace. It’s so great to see all those people walking around Kansas City again in their Oklahoma State orange sweatshirts, the Iowa State gold jackets, their Kansas State purple hats. It’s great to see people, restaurants, to walk with big crowds downtown, to watch big-time college basketball here. This is what so many people had in mind. It’s amazing to be in an arena in Kansas City where the food is good, the concourses wide, the sound clear and the player locker rooms look like the lobby of the Ritz Carlton.

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To reach Joe Posnanski, call 816-234-4361 or send e-mail to jposnanski@kcstar.com. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com.