On a February night in 1948, a sense of anticipation wafted through the blue tobacco haze that filled Chicago Stadium. A crowd of 17,853 fans had paid good money to see two teams from two different worlds.

On one side were the Harlem Globetrotters, the clown princes of basketball, known for their showboating repertoire of flashy ball handling, half-court hook shots and comedy skits. They were barnstormers who played night after night mostly against teams of has-beens and small-town heroes in church basements and high school gyms across the heartland.

On the other side were the Minneapolis Lakers, the most fearsome team in professional basketball, a squad anchored by 6-foot-10-inch George Mikan, the sport's first great big man. The Lakers played a regular schedule in an established professional league, the National Basketball League, one of the precursors to the National Basketball Association.

The Lakers were all white, and the Trotters were all black, at a time when professional basketball leagues were clinging to a tenuous color line.

It would be a game of questions. Could whites and blacks play together without incident? Could the Trotters put aside their clowning and play serious ball against a serious team? How could a team whose tallest starter was 6 inches shorter than Mikan hope to win in a real game?

The answers would come in what historian Timuel Black calls "one of the great, historic games in American history."

With the score tied in the waning seconds, the Globetrotters' Ermer Robinson took a pass from ball-handling wizard Marques Haynes and lofted a one-handed shot from at least 30 feet out. The horn sounded as the shot was in the air, then the ball slipped through the hoop for a 61-59 Globetrotters' victory.

Nearly six decades later, the contest has become the subject of a book by John Christgau, "Tricksters in the Madhouse: Lakers vs. Globetrotters, 1948," and one of the pivotal events covered in a new documentary about the Globetrotters, "The Team that Changed the World," which will be aired on Blue Ridge Public Television stations on an as-yet unspecificed date in May.

The game helped, in the long run, to bring an end to the color line in professional basketball.

"All of the racist arguments about keeping blacks out of basketball, began to be undone with that game," Christgau says in the documentary. In 1950, Globetrotters' star Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton was one of three African-Americans who integrated the NBA.

The game also helped propel the Globetrotters from admired entertainers to national and international icons. They went from playing in cramped, dingy gyms to being the subjects of Hollywood movies and playing in front of 32,000 fans at the Rose Bowl and making a Cold War statement by playing before 75,000 in Berlin.

Prejudice unseen

The Globetrotters began in 1926 in Chicago as the Savoy Big Five. Sports promoter Abe Saperstein got control of the team and took the newly renamed Harlem Globetrotters on the road, where they faced endless bus rides, fleabag hotels and, often, racism.

"The main thing I've found out in my travels is there's more prejudice unseen - and it's worse than prejudice where they got a sign that tells you we don't want you here," Vertes Ziegler, a Trotter who played in the 1948 Lakers game, recalls in "The Team that Changed the World."

They played straight ball at first, and were good enough to win the World Professional Tournament held in Chicago in 1940. The Trotters added clowning to their performances as a way of keeping things interesting when they were running away with the score. They frequently ran up winning streaks of 100 games or more.

Despite the team's success, many whites didn't take black basketball seriously. "Experts" pronounced that blacks had small lungs, heavy bones and poor leaping abilities and didn't have what it took, physically or intellectually, to excel at the highest levels of basketball.

Saperstein, however, knew his team's abilities were a match for anyone. "We'll play anybody," he said. Lakers owner Max Winter accepted his challenge.

Both men believed such a game could be a big money maker. They were right. The crowd of nearly 18,000 was twice as large as any that had previously watched a professional basketball game in Chicago.

The game

At first, Christgau writes in "Tricksters in the Madhouse," it seemed the Lakers would run away with the game. Mikan took a pass and scored easily over the Trotters' much-shorter center, Goose Tatum, to make it 2-0. Then it was 6-0. Then 9-2 and 13-4.

The Trotters fought back. Haynes scored twice, including an easy layup after he scooped up a loose ball, and the game was tied at 15-15. But the Lakers pulled ahead again, taking an 11-point lead and then going into halftime with a 32-23 cushion - a comfortable margin in the days before shot clocks and 3-point field goals.

Inside the locker room, the Trotters' Babe Pressley, the team's unofficial player-coach, told his teammates: "We should run 'em. Push it up the court. Tire 'em. . . . Mikan's slow getting up and down the court. He won't be able to keep up."

With Haynes running the show, the Globetrotters rushed down the court again and again, making easy shots and drawing fouls. Soon the score was tied at 38.

The game was tight from there, with the teams trading baskets and free throws. Mikan hit a foul shot with 90 seconds left, his 24th point, to tie the score at 59.

Fans chanted "Freeze-the-ball!" as the Globetrotters held it for the final shot.

With five seconds left, the Trotters made their move. Haynes, dribbling the ball, was the Trotters' leading scorer in the game with 17 points. He seemed a logical choice to take the last shot.

Instead, Christgau writes, he spotted his teammate Robinson and sent him a message with a subtle narrowing of his eyes. They'd played together enough that they knew what to do. Haynes bounced the ball to Robinson and set a pick on Robinson's defender.

Robinson, perhaps 10 feet beyond the free throw circle, had time to take an unhurried shot.

"I knew it was going in," Zeigler would recall later. "I said: It's got to go in."

After it did, the Globetrotters carried Robinson away on their shoulders.

The celebration was brief. They were back on the road the next night, playing in Richmond, Ind. On March 4, 1948, the Trotters notched the 3,000th win in their history.

In April, the Lakers won the National Basketball League title. The Minneapolis team would become the first dynasty of the early NBA before moving on to the warmer environs of Los Angeles.

In 1949, a year after their first showdown, the Trotters and Lakers had a rematch in Chicago Stadium. The Trotters won once again, 49-45. The crowd topped 20,000 and, more importantly, the game was covered by Movietone newsreel, bringing the Globetrotters brand of athletic and comedic genius to millions of filmgoers.

The Trotters began roaming the world, becoming known as ambassadors of America - and of basketball. Yao Ming, the current NBA star from China, was inspired to play basketball by the Globetrotters.

With the integration of the NBA, the Globetrotters lost their monopoly on the best black players in America. The Trotters played the Lakers five times in the 1950s, and the Lakers came out on top each time, winning by as many as 24 points in one contest.

The Globetrotters began touring with their own opponents, patsy teams whose job was to lose gracefully as the Trotters made people laugh. The Trotters became known as a comedy act that happened to play hoops.

But in the 1990s, the Trotters made a return to competitive basketball with an annual series of pre-season games against college teams.

In 2003, they beat defending NCAA basketball champion Syracuse by a score of 83-70 - proving once again what they'd established 55 years before: The Harlem Globetrotters, the funniest ballclub in the world, also had to be taken seriously as a basketball team.