The Badgers arrive at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis ahead of the Big Ten Tournament championship game against Michigan.

Rich Klesmit had a breathtaking view of the Rocky Mountains from his hotel room last week. He was in Denver for a trip in the middle of a chaotic week that included both business and pleasure, happy as ever as he described what he was seeing while taking in the scenery.

What Klesmit never could have imagined at the time was that he’d be back in the same city a week later, this time for the start of what he hopes will be a long run for the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball team in the NCAA Tournament.

Klesmit and his frequent traveling companion — wife, Kelly — would much prefer to be making the 90-minute drive down I-41 from their home to watch their son Max, a fifth-year senior guard for the Badgers, play the game he loves this week. The list of people who were disappointed that Wisconsin didn’t end up in Milwaukee is long, and the Klesmits are on it somewhere.

But if Rich and Kelly have proven anything over the years, it’s that they’ll travel anywhere, anytime, to watch their three children play a game.

“The lengths they go is ridiculous,” Max said. “I want to say I’m going to be that parent one day, but you also can’t be two places at once.”

While that may be true, it’s certainly not due to lack of effort on his parents’ part.

Why Rich and Kelly Klesmit ‘do a lot of high-fiving’

They were on and off high school sweethearts in Neenah, went their separate ways in college and found love again years later. They’re closing in on their 29th wedding anniversary.

The most fascinating part about Kelly that some people may not know is she was once a commercial airline pilot for Midwest Express and later United.

True story: Little Max, 4 or 5 years old at the time, once was strapped into a seat with his mother seated right next to him on a flight from Appleton to Chicago. Nothing out of the ordinary there, other than the fact that it was Kelly’s way of giving her son an adventure on one of her off days. There were seats available on the flight, so she secured some non-revenue tickets and off they went to O’Hare Airport.

They ate at McDonald’s in the airport, Max played around in what he remembers nearly two decades later was a “huge jungle gym,” and they hopped on a flight back to Appleton.

Kelly decided to retire from flying after she got pregnant with Rowan, the couple’s third child and their only girl.

“I didn’t want to miss things,” she said, “which as it turns out was probably a good decision because I would have missed a lot of stuff.”

When the Badgers closed the regular season against Penn State on March 8, Rich and Kelly were in their usual seats at the Kohl Center. Max wasn’t playing due to injury, but there was no chance they were missing this game: It was senior day.

But they could be excused for having one eye on the game in front of them and another on the one streaming on Kelly’s phone: Cal, their middle child and a redshirt freshman guard at Northern Michigan, was playing in the semifinal of his conference tournament.

A hectic stretch of games actually had begun that Wednesday in Marquette, Michigan, where Kelly traveled through a storm that dropped more than two feet of snow on some parts of the Upper Peninsula to watch Cal’s final regular-season game. She made it back to Neenah in the wee hours of the morning, got some sleep and managed to work part of the day at her job as a special education teacher at a Neenah middle school.

Rich and Kelly drove that night to Stevens Point to watch what turned out to be the final game of Rowan’s junior season: The Neenah girls fell to Eau Claire Memorial in a WIAA Division 1 sectional semifinal.

After the Badgers’ loss to the Nittany Lions on Saturday, the Klesmits stayed out late with some of the other Wisconsin families at a group gathering hosted by the seniors’ parents at Wando’s.

Team Klesmit left Madison at 6 a.m. the next morning for a 5-plus hour drive to watch Cal in the championship game in Houghton. Rich drove and Kelly mostly napped, but at least they were together. That’s not always the case during basketball season.

When Rich says “we do a lot of high-fiving this time of year,” he means it in the figurative sense; they feel like two ships passing in the night at times. But it’d work in the literal sense as well: There’s been a lot of hand-slapping while celebrating their kids’ accomplishments over the years.

Why the Klesmit family watches a lot of basketball

It’s not a stretch to say the Klesmit family lives and breathes basketball.

“This is kind of sad,” Rich said, “but we don’t watch much else on TV other than basketball.”

Even how they watched those games sets apart Team Klesmit from the rest. Rich, who played for legendary Neenah coach Ron Einerson in high school, would encourage his kids at a young age to not follow the ball while watching games. Look for the little details that make players and teams good, he’d tell them. Try to pick out the nuances of certain systems. Appreciate how the game is played. Notice how players impact winning without scoring a point.

Max is a perfect example of that this season. He’s shooting 28.2% from 3-point range, down from 39.8% a year ago, and there’s little doubt a nagging ankle injury that has plagued him most of the season has been a major contributing factor in that decline. But he still impacts winning in a variety of ways.

Do yourself a favor: Take your eyes off the ball for two or three defensive possessions when the Badgers (26-9) open NCAA Tournament play with a game against Montana (25-9) on Thursday at Ball Arena and just watch Max chase the player he’s guarding around screens. Look closely and you even may see him subtly delivering a shoulder shiver with the intent of making that screener think twice the next time Wisconsin’s No. 11 comes rushing at him.

“Let’s say you take 15 shots a game,” Rich says now, relaying the message he’s delivered many a time over the years. “Those 15 shots take you 3 seconds. So you’re talking about 45 seconds of an entire game. Let’s say you’re playing 33 minutes a game, what are you doing the balance of that time?”

Rich coached each of his three kids from second through eighth grade before turning over each of them to someone else once they reached high school. All three were raised as lead guards who were responsible for making good decisions and getting their teammates involved in the game and make everyone around them better.

“I think they’re all very similar players,” Kelly said. “They all are more concerned with whatever it takes to win. Whatever that looks like, that’s what they’ll do.”

Max has a reputation as a trash talker, and his parents say Cal fits that description as well. Not so much for Rowan, and Kelly said she wishes her daughter had a little more edginess to her.

That said, her parents believe Rowan might be further along from a developmental standpoint than her brothers were at her age. Being the youngest does have its advantages.

“She learned so much from them growing up,” Kelly said about Rowan, who has a handful of NCAA Division II offers and hopes to turn heads on the Division I level with her performance in AAU ball this spring. “We tried to do girls stuff with her — let’s get her in Brownies, let’s try dance and gymnastics — and she wasn’t having any of it. She’d try it, but when it came down to it, all she wanted to do was play hoops with the boys.”

While nobody in the family was happy that Rowan’s team checked out of the postseason two wins shy of reaching state, there was one silver lining to that defeat:

It made an already busy weekend a little less complicated.

Why the Klesmits aren’t ready for this ride to end

Kelly and Rowan packed enough clothes to last them a week when they departed last week for Indianapolis, where Rich joined them after taking a flight from Denver, the second stop on a business trip that began in Pennsylvania.

The three of them watched Max and the Badgers beat Northwestern in a Big Ten Tournament game Thursday and UCLA in a quarterfinal the following day. Rich drove Saturday to Springfield, Illinois, where Cal and Northern Michigan were playing in an NCAA Division II opener in a game that tipped off at the same time Wisconsin was playing Michigan State in a semifinal.

The Wildcats, who would have played again Sunday and Tuesday if they got on a roll, lost to conference foe Michigan Tech. That meant Rich could get back to Indy for the Badgers’ championship showdown with Michigan State on Sunday.

“Three hours,” Rich said, “is like going to the grocery store for us.”

When Rich was asked if he and Kelly ever have pulled off two games in one day, the master of the one-liner delivered this quip:

“That’s a walk in the park, bro, c’mon,” he said.

The Klesmits seem to thrive on the challenge of getting to as many games as they can. The only Wisconsin game Rich missed this season was at Maryland. The only two games Rowan didn’t have one of her parents at a game was when they were in Los Angeles for the Badgers’ games against Southern Cal and UCLA in January. Cal missed the first 12 games of the season with a fractured wrist he sustained while taking a charge in an exhibition game at Michigan State, so Rich and Kelly have tried extra hard to attend as many of his games as possible.

Don’t mention to Rich and Kelly that all of this could lead to logistical headaches at times because that’s just not the way they view the situation. They want to be there to console after tough losses and celebrate after big wins.

Max remembers a time from his freshman season at Wofford when he had a rough performance in a game at Virginia Military Institute and was happy Rich, who had driven 865 miles to watch, was there to hand out a hug.

“You really take things for granted, especially as a young person and don’t realize how much of a commitment that is for them,” Max said.

The Klesmits have put a lot of miles on their Nissan Armada and Infiniti Q70L. Flying to Denver instead of driving to Milwaukee? So be it.

After a stretch of 12 games in 10 days, they’re hoping the Badgers keep this basketball season going as long as possible.

“It’s been fun living it,” Kelly said. “And it’s not over.”

Next stop: Denver, where the Klesmit family hopes the basketball is as breathtaking as the view.

Photos: Wisconsin men’s basketball faces Michigan in Big Ten Tourney title game