Oregon State guard Damarco Minor, center, draws contact on a drive to the basket during Thursday's game against Oregon.

CORVALLIS — The win could be traced back to a text message.

Before tipoff on Thursday, Oregon men’s basketball assistant coach Mike Mennenga typed out a note to senior big man Nate Bittle.

Bittle remembered reading, “Let’s go show these guys this is your state.”

He took it to heart.

The 2020 Class 5A state player of the year at Crater, Bittle set career highs in points and rebounds to lead the Ducks to a 78-75 victory over Oregon State at Gill Coliseum.

And after he secured the rebound on what would have been the game-tying 3-pointer by Michael Rataj as time expired, Bittle stood in front of a silenced student section, pointed at the floor, and shouted, “This is my state! This is my state! This is my state!”

For the Beavers, it was another knife through the heart as the opportunity for a galvanizing win slipped through their fingers.

For Bittle, it was a moment of triumph.

“I just wanted to let everybody know,” he said later.

But in the changing world of college athletics — where Oregon left Oregon State behind in the realignment scramble and Oregon has gone global, rather than local — this night was a welcome reminder of what can happen when these two rival schools come together, and what it can mean.

As Oregon football grows as a national power and Dan Lanning recruits the farthest reaches of the country to build out a juggernaut that can battle Ohio State and Michigan, can withstand trips to Lincoln and Madison and State College, Oregon the college sports behemoth becomes less representative of Oregon the state.

But on Thursday, you had Bittle, from Central Point, scoring 17 of his 23 points in the second half and pulling down 14 rebounds, and West Linn’s Jackson Shelstad going head to head with his former high school rival Josiah Lake II, from Tualatin, a former walk-on who has emerged as a leader at OSU.

The 7-foot Bittle was a force inside, scoring time and again over a Beavers defense that had few answers. Shelstad scored 11 of the Ducks’ final 17 points to help them climb back from a 12-point second half deficit.

Shelstad knocked down three 3-pointers in that flurry, and made perhaps his toughest shot, a driving hook shot on the baseline with 29 seconds left that kept the Ducks ahead by the three points. I guess that means it’s his state, too.

“This is a huge rivalry,” Shelstad said. “We’ve been watching this growing up.”

Said Bittle: “It’s you’re a Duck or you’re a Beaver in the state of Oregon growing up. And I’ve always been a Duck.”

That’s far from a new concept to anyone living inside the borders of this state, certainly. But one that seems to get overlooked by the powerful forces guiding college sports. Forces that seem to have determined that things like this rivalry, in whatever sport you choose, is not all that important. That it is disposable.

I would have invited anyone who thinks that way to step outside of Gill Coliseum on Thursday and observe the record number of students waiting for the doors to open.

An hour before tipoff, the line stretched out of the front doors of Gill Coliseum, down 26th Avenue, past the intramural fields and Dixon Recreation Center, nearly reaching Weatherford Hall. Wayne Tinkle came out of the building, trotted down the steps and high-fived the raucous crowd.

The Beavers would later announce that 3,267 students came out, the most for an OSU men’s basketball game.

Would it have been the same if the game were in Eugene, where a game against the Beavers might not feel for the Ducks like the opportunity for validation that it did in Corvallis?

Probably not.

Going forward, any win for the Beavers against Oregon is going to feel like a victory for the forgotten and the underprivileged.

I hate to look at this only through the lens of realignment, and the destruction it has wrought, but it’s impossible not to. The Ducks played this game with “Big Ten” patches stitched onto their jerseys. The Beavers have both “Pac-12,” their official conference, and “WCC,” their temporary home for hoops, painted on the floor.

Bitterness abounds over the divergent fates of these two schools. I hear about it from fans all the time. Beavers feel hopeless about being abandoned. Ducks think they should stop whining. It’s the kind of banter that makes for a good rivalry, if only there was the infrastructure for one to truly exist.

The football teams played in September this year and will again next season, but the future beyond that is hazy.

The Oregon State women opted against playing the Ducks this year.

But in the men’s rivalry, where the last four games in Corvallis have come down to the final possession, Thursday’s game was so good that you might have left thinking, “That was terrific, when’s the next one?” Not until next year, when both rosters could consist entirely of new players all over again.

Oregon will find its way in the Big Ten and Tinkle seems to have found a mix of players that can be a real factor in the West Coast Conference this season if it consistently plays as smart and hard as it did for most of Thursday night.

Both teams should have left Gill feeling good about their trajectories, even if Altman grumbled about his team needing to get better and Tinkle lamented his revamped squad repeatedly shooting itself in the foot.

But if this is your state, like it is for Bittle and like it is for Shelstad, it’s OK to feel sad about the loss.

And I don’t mean the outcome of the game.