Grand Canyon basketball and the Havocs will bring some fun to March Madness

To enter the purple realm of a Grand Canyon Antelopes game — sorry, Lopes, my bad — is to realize an energy still unfamiliar to many yet blossomed to infectious. It’s not just the ardent travelers for a Western Athletic Conference tournament or Coach Bryce Drew’s program about to make its third NCAA tournament appearance in the past four years. No, the student section alone counts as a triumph of creativity and choreography, not to mention noise.

If you’ve never heard students from a Christian school and a dry campus, some of them shirtless, spend a timeout belting out every single lyric to DMX’s eternal 1999 classic “Party Up (Up In Here),” well, then, you should.

How many athletic directors end an interview as did Jamie Boggs of Grand Canyon?

“I’m glad you got to experience our Havocs,” she said.

They’re Havocs, officially, and any one of them, in everyday parlance, is said to be “a Havoc.” It’s perfectly normal and sprightly for one of them to tell you something along the lines of, “Oh, I’ve been a Havoc for so-and-so years now.” They’re the students bouncing and booming from one side of the 7,000-seat home arena or from three end zone sections of the conference tournament in Las Vegas. They’re proof of the earthly possibility of a beer-less madness, and they make ample use of the word “party” among their concepts, with MAKJ & Timmy Trumpet’s “Party Till We Die” among the habitual songs.

They’re not only organized but damned-well organized. They have a president. They have a vice president. They have a director of teams (including dance, cheer, acrobatic, so on), a social media officer, another social media officer, a third social media officer, a game-day officer, another game-day officer, a third game-day officer, a marketing officer, another marketing officer, and a rookie leader, another rookie leader, a third rookie leader, a fourth rookie leader, a fifth rookie leader and a sixth rookie leader.

They’ve got an office, at least of sorts, as said President Luke Stoffel from Fort Wayne, Ind. “I’d call it more of a — it’s a place where we can kind of plan out for games,” he said. Their traditions — for a program that started Division I in 2013-14 — include eye-pleasing streamers and huge banners that get draped over themselves, and so, “We’ve got a lot of streamers in there, and we have big banners that we drop during games.” They were a smidgen late for a…