Over two months ago, I announced something that for a long time was unthinkable. I felt it brewing for a while, and knew the day was coming. Now, with a couple of months of hindsight and with (hopefully) a college basketball season in front of us, how does it feel?
I don’t think I’ll know until we’re into the season. It’s barely on my radar, to be honest, and part of that is because we have no idea what a college basketball season is going to look like. Everything we thought we knew when we had a given start date is basically wrong. Multi-team events (MTEs) are being upended, with the ESPN ones planned for Orlando all going under, and as coronavirus cases surge again, caution takes over.
I continue to read plenty about college basketball, as my interest hasn’t waned entirely. Once the games come, I’ll watch what I can on television with some interest. With fans unlikely to be part of the games this year, I don’t plan on being in an arena this season, which I’ll certainly miss. Even so, I certainly don’t feel the anticipation I used to, and I can’t chalk that up entirely to the mystery of what the season may look like.
Indeed, there is a lot I was already missing as I had to pull away from the game and focus on other areas of life that demand my time and attention. There are many great things happening, but my many years of covering college basketball and everything connected to it are full of memories that come back often. I was living the dream for all that time, and nothing will change that.
I can think back to so many great games I covered, from NCAA Tournament games such as Villanova edging Pittsburgh on Scottie Reynolds’ last-second basket to advance to the Final Four in 2009 and Vermont’s epic overtime win over Syracuse in 2005, all the way down to games that don’t even hit my top ten all-time games like Northeastern edging George Mason in January 2009. I covered many conference tournaments, saw many teams punch their tickets to the NCAA Tournament and also saw the agony of defeat.
In fact, on the latter point, I won’t ever forget when I walked into the locker room of a team in a one-bid league that lost a close championship game – it was like walking into a morgue. It was understandable, as the game was for all the marbles, and the kids cared. If you doubt that these kids care, you should have seen that or what I saw after a NEPSAC championship game was won in the final seconds a few years later – kids from the losing locker room walking out beside themselves, in tears. I can only imagine what it would have been like to walk into the Hofstra locker room in 2015 after they lost to William & Mary in the CAA semifinals, a double overtime thriller just days after I covered another one in the Northeast Conference Tournament at Bryant.
As someone who was on the losing side of a couple of championships as a young athlete, I know the feeling only too well. It was still sobering to see it up close and personal, and the cases where my teams lost had a lot less at stake.
As much as anything, I miss the people in the game. The obvious people are the players and coaches, along with administrators and media colleagues, but media relations people are also among them. Increasingly, media relations is taking a hit, with Vanderbilt eliminating its athletic communications team a while back, Memphis laying off its team and Delaware recently eliminating the position of one of the best I ever dealt with in Scott Day. Long-time Brown media relations director Chris Humm is retiring at the end of the calendar year, which brought to mind many great Friday and Saturday nights of Ivy League basketball at the Pizzitola Center in Providence. Oftentimes, the Saturday night game would be my second one of the day.
It was interesting to reflect a few months back with a colleague on the New England Division I schools in particular. There were seasons where I saw every one of those schools play before the new year came, and most seasons I saw all of them at least once before the season was over. Even with UMass-Lowell and Merrimack recently joining the ranks, I covered at least one game at every single current Division I school in New England except for Dartmouth and technically Quinnipiac and Sacred Heart, although I was in arenas for both of the Connecticut schools a few times for other events.
In all, the game is wonderful to see up close and personal like I was able to for the better part of nearly two decades. I have been in packed houses and tiny crowds where you could hear pretty much everyone talk. Some of those packed houses came in great high school games like the 2014 Massachusetts Division 4 championship, where St. Clement edged Quaboag Regional in a thriller before I got back on the road to cover the last game ever played at Stony Brook’s Pritchard Gymnasium – another example, ironically enough, of seeing the agony defeat in March.
I could probably spend days looking back fondly on all of these years of covering college basketball, and I’m sure at times in the months ahead the memories will come rushing back a few at a time. A lot of things can spur these memories, though nothing like the season being here. Here’s hoping we can have a college basketball season, and then conference tournaments and the NCAA Tournament to remind us why March is the best month of the year.