Hooping It Up in Springfield, Mass. : Basketball Hall of Fame offers a hands-on experience for fans of any age.

Cheer up, you die-hard basketball fans who think the world ends after the NBA Finals.

There is a place, just off Highway 91 in the heart of Springfield, Mass., where you can get your fill of slam-dunk excitement all year long.

It’s the Basketball Hall of Fame, a lively exhibition of large shoes and large jerseys, where you can shoot hoops on a practice court or join the big boys for an eight-minute, so-real-you’ll-sweat game.

The museum is easy to recognize: It’s red, white and blue, with silhouettes of players running down the sides. Each year a handful of heroes is elected to the Honors Court, there in the New England town where basketball was born in 1891.

The game was invented by James Naismith, then a student at the International YMCA Training School, which later became Springfield College. His assignment: to dream up an indoor sport that would keep the lads active in wintertime.

“In summer, spring and fall, there were lots of exciting games outdoors,” Naismith wrote. “But in the winter, calesthenics were not doing the trick. Men were cutting their gymnasium classes.”

The first teams had nine players. The first ball was a soccer ball. The first baskets were peach baskets.

While the game was an immediate success, some refinements proved vital: When Naismith nailed the first peach basket to a gym balcony, 10 feet off the ground, he didn’t bother with a backboard. That addition was made to keep spectators from blocking the shots, or guiding them home.

But the greatest improvement--it seems to me--was when they removed the bottoms from the peach baskets so that the ball would drop through. Before then, someone had to retrieve the ball each time a basket was scored.

While touring the Hall of Fame this spring, I learned that women’s basketball was introduced in 1893 at Smith College, in nearby Northampton, Mass. I learned that the first name suggested for the new sport was Naismithball.

With photos, trophies, pennants and videos, the museum honors all levels of championship basketball: high school, college, amateur, professional and international.

You can view tapes of Olympic Games, and learn the strategies behind past Final Four triumphs. (Example: “How North Carolina beat Wilt Chamberlain in 1957.”) You can wander among enormous photographs of a leaping Larry Bird or a soaring Michael Jordan--photos that seem to be blowups, but may be no larger than life.

Pulsing music gives a courtside intensity.

Bob Lanier’s size-22 shoes are displayed--both in leather and in bronze. A 6-11 center for the NBA’s Detroit Pistons and Milwaukee Bucks from 1970-1984, Lanier was among this year’s Hall of Fame inductees. Legendary coaches such as John Wooden, the UCLA wizard, and North Carolina’s Dean Smith are honored with state-of-the-art displays.

But it’s the hands-on part of this modern palace of champions that most visitors find irresistible. Men and women, youngsters and seniors, line up to try their skills at shooting hoops in a sleek, high-ceilinged court. Basketballs are constantly replaced in a trough that resembles a bowling ball return.

I did not score a basket that afternoon, but the kid next to me did. And, when he suggested that I use both hands, I managed to hit the rim.

The court is a good warm-up for the theater’s four-screen action film: “Play 52.” Spectators stand in the center of a small darkened room and suddenly are in the thick of the play. Giant arms and legs flail on all sides as they fight for the basket.

Everyone’s yelling. You try not to foul.

When the lights came up, on the day of my visit, one kid still had his arms in the air. “I was ready,” he said breathlessly, “but they never passed to me.”

Me, neither.