It was Thanksgiving. My parent’s house was packed with family and friends. We were all sitting around our long dining room table, slowly working our way through second and third helpings, when the conversation turned to sports. We live in Philadelphia - have for over a decade. It was the start of the college basketball season, and in Philly, allegiances run deep. At our table, people debated whether Temple or Villanova would win the Big 5, whether LaSalle had enough experience to finally make the Dance, whether Penn was finally going to be relevant in the Ivy League again. At some point, a rather curmudgeonly friend broke in.


“Wait,” he said. “I can’t handle all this sports talk. Really? With everything going on in the world, we’re going to talk about sports? The economy is still falling apart. 350 people a year are getting murdered here in Philly. The world’s a mess, and all you guys want to talk about is sports? What’s wrong with you? Sports don’t matter. All it is anymore is money, money, money. The players want it, the corporations have it, and you all are giving them more of it with your blind fealty.”

From across the table, my father and I looked at one another and shared a knowing smile. The friend noticed.

“What?” he said. “Do you disagree?” And then, for good measure, he added, once more, “Sports do not matter.”



~



I did not grow up in Philadelphia.

I grew up on a dead end street in Valparaiso, Indiana. At the end of this street was an abandoned house, and beyond that was a field of wild wheat. Around the time I was old enough to start playing basketball at the local YMCA, I convinced my father to erect a basketball hoop at the end of this street, in front of the abandoned house. So one spring, we bought a basketball hoop and a can of red spray paint, took our tape measure out, and built ourselves a basketball court.

Anyone who follows basketball knows about Indiana’s connection to the game. It’s become, in some ways, a myth: peach baskets hammered onto barns; claustrophobic old gyms where the locals know every dead spot on the floor; kids resisting the calls of their parents to shoot hoops until night overtakes them.

My younger brother and I played our very small role in this myth. If our parents couldn’t find us, it was very likely they would just have to stick their head out the front door and listen for the sound of a dribbling basketball. The two of us were an unbeatable duo, imaginary heroes draining imaginary buzzer beaters. Our favorite fantasy was that we were members of the team at Valparaiso University, where our father was a professor. We spent afternoons that soon became evenings playing entire NCAA tournaments, leading Valpo on a series of improbable upsets that always ended, it seemed, with one of us hitting a buzzer beater.

This was as fantastical as any make-believe could be. For years, the Valparaiso men’s basketball team had been an afterthought. The school, with less than 4000 students, was just too small, most people believed, to ever be seriously competitive. And yet every winter, much of the city flocked to campus to watch forgettable team after forgettable team. It was, in some ways, a perfect representation of life in a forgotten Midwestern town: people with invisible lives coming together to watch an irrelevant basketball team, season after season.

Why did we keep coming back?

Perhaps because the game was in our blood. Perhaps because the sounds and smells of the game - the varnish of hardwood, the squeak and squelch of sneakers, the sensual pleasure of a perfect jump shot settling through the net - brought to mind pickup games with brothers, sweaty gyms endured with fathers, long lonely bus rides through the cornfields on the way to hostile little bandboxes where girls in plaid skirts cheered and bad high school bands blared. Or maybe we came, year after year, because of the reason most of us watch sports: the hope that, someday, we will see something transcendent, something memorable. Maybe we kept coming back because, deep down, we hoped that our blind faith in the game would eventually be rewarded.



~



I’m getting ahead of myself. Because although this a story about the NCAA Tournament, it’s also the story of a town and it’s two basketball teams. It’s important I start at the beginning.

Valparaiso is a typical Midwestern suburb. It was once a way station on the rail line between Detroit and Chicago, a place where farmers could congregate and sell their goods. As Chicago expanded, and the steel industry boomed in Gary, Valpo - as it’s affectionately known to locals - became a safe, quiet place to live, away from the bustle of the mills or the havoc of the city. Like most small American towns, it’s a pastiche of old and new - a mile long brick main street that is home to restaurants and cafes; a bloated periphery marked by the newest chain stores; old clapboard churches coexisting beside bland new mega congregations.

In an anonymous small town like Valparaiso, the ritual of basketball - with its rules and imperfections, with its momentary glimpses of that higher perfect form - is where the failures and difficulties of life can be redeemed. For two hours, you can go and forget yourself while watching five local kids try to transform the unruly nature of a game into something resembling perfection. Or, alone in a gym, you can work towards that perfection yourself, shot after shot, seeking, through repetition, a synthesis of body and motion. I think it was Updike who said the only thing better than sex is a perfect basketball shot.

And in an anonymous small town like Valparaiso, local legends matter, too - those luminous few kids who grow up and carry the expectations of the town on their shoulders. They portend a future beyond the constraints of the town’s invisible life. The local kid who makes good is a classic American parable. It redeems all of our dreams, both major and minor. It makes them possible. If you stop at some of the local restaurants in Valpo - ‘Schoop’s’ on Calumet, or ‘Around the Clock’ on Lincolnway - you’ll find black and white photographs of former basketball stars, their stoic gazes fixed on some distant horizon that, one can guess, does not include Valparaiso. It’s like this in most small towns, too.

In 1994, Valpo was blessed with not one, but two local boys that seemed destined to become legends, figures that would be talked about in bleachers and diners for decades to come. That year, Bryce Drew and Tim Bishop were seniors at Valparaiso High School. They were not just ordinary Indiana kids. Their futures, it seemed, were limitless. Bryce, whose father, Homer, was head basketball coach at the university, was the best basketball player in the most rabid basketball state in the country. He was soft spoken, almost unfailingly humble and devout. A scrawny 6’3”, Bryce had undergone heart surgery the previous summer, and wasn’t sure he would be able to play his senior season. But not only did he play, he developed into a fearsome scorer. His jump shot was like silk, and he could score from just about anywhere inside of half court. Tim, who was Bryce’s more vocal backcourt mate, was somehow even more gifted. Not only could he own a basketball game, but he was a baseball and football star. While coaches from Syracuse and Notre Dame came to recruit Bryce, scouts from New York and Chicago were talking about making Tim a professional baseball player, right out of high school. If that didn’t pan out, it was O.K. - Tim already had a football scholarship to Indiana University.

That winter, the two of them led the Valpo Vikings on a rampage through the state. In November, they started winning…and they kept on winning. Every home game, nearly 6000 fans filed into Viking gym to watch, what they assumed, were the final games of the best team in Valpo history. The five starters - Drew, Bishop, Mark Burnison, Ryan Erdelac, and David Furlin - had played together since their YMCA days, and were close friends off the court. They played an appealing brand of small ball. Without a true center, they won with creativity and hustle - that, and great outside shooting. I was eight at the time, but I remember my dad trudging my brother and I through the snow so we could see what the fuss was all about - so that, someday, we could say we saw Bryce and Tim play together.

The undersized Vikings entered the Semi-State finals against East Chicago Central 25-0 and ranked number 1 in the state. The game, held at Purdue University in West Lafayette, was a classic. East Chicago hit tying three pointers at the end of regulation and overtime number one; Bryce made a tying free throw at the end of overtime number two; East Chicago missed what would have been a game winning free throw at the end overtime number three.

Finally, though, it looked like the magical season might end. The Vikings trailed 82-81 with three seconds left. They drew up an inbounds play for Tim. He curled around a screen. Falling away from the basket, a bigger defender in his face, he banked in a miraculous shot, sending Valpo to State. I listened to the game on the radio in my basement - staying up long after my bedtime - and ran around my house with joy when the shot fell. That shot, all these years later, is still a legend in Valparaiso. It’s called, quite simply, Tim’s shot.

A week later, the Vikings led a parade to State. I still remember the caravan of school buses, bedecked in green and white, scrawled in shaving cream, pulling out of town with a police escort.

Anyone who has seen the film ‘Hoosiers’ understands what it means - or what it meant, back when every school, no matter its size, competed in one tournament - to be Indiana High School Basketball Champion. It’s a point of pride. It gives a town its own myth to tell, a legend for kids to aspire to. But for Valpo, it was more than that. They were trying to become only the 7th undefeated state champion in Indiana history - and they were trying to do it their own way: with heart instead of size, with grit instead of speed.

On Saturday, March 26, Valpo played South Bend Clay for the Indiana State Basketball crown. They controlled the game from the opening tip. With 58 seconds remaining, they led by 8, and the sports writers on press row were putting the finishing touches on their coronations. The thousands of fans who had made the trip to the RCA dome in Indianapolis chanted and rollicked in the stands, ready to celebrate. Back in Valparaiso, I watched the game on local cable access with my father and brother. We began counting down the seconds left.

Then, a strange thing happened. Clay - led by future college stars Lee Nailon and Jaraan Cornell - started chucking up three pointers. And they couldn’t miss. At the regulation buzzer, Cornell hit a desperation heave from a few steps inside half court to force overtime. When Tim fouled out a minute into overtime, the game got away from the Vikings. They lost, 93-88. Tim had scored 35 points; Bryce 29. It hadn’t been enough. Our local heroes had been felled at the last.

That night, I cried myself to sleep.



~



Two surprising things happened that summer. The first was that Bryce spurned the traditional basketball powerhouses and enrolled at Valparaiso University to play basketball for his father, Homer. His reasoning, we later found out, was simple. “He loves his father too much,” his mother, Janet, would say years later.

The second surprise was that Tim was drafted by the New York Mets.

The sting of the state final slowly receded. We would get another four years of Bryce carrying our hopes on his shoulders - this time, at a national level. And we would follow Tim from afar as he fulfilled all of our unspoken dreams: to get out of Valpo.



~



As a sports fan, there’s no love quite like your first love. The team that you fall for as a kid will always have a deeper hold over you than any team you might adopt later in life. When watching this first love, you’ll find yourself, even as an adult, feeling like you’ve been transported back to those days when sports mattered in some way that went deeper than money, or PED’s - when the team you loved wasn’t a separate entity, but was an extension of your identity, a piece of yourself.

The first team I loved was the Valparaiso University men’s basketball team. I’d been going to Crusaders games since before I could walk. As I got older, my brother started tagging along, too. He and I would roam the Athletics Recreation Center, where Valpo played, and feel like kings. We’d climb all the way to the very top of the upper deck. We’d sneak courtside. We’d walk along the track that circumnavigated the lower seating bowl, and watch the games from every vantage point.

For nearly a decade, my brother, father and I attended almost every Valpo home game. It would have taken a natural disaster to keep us away. Even a family birth wasn’t enough to do the trick. The night my sister was born - December 12, 1992 - we were there, at the ARC, as Valpo came back from a twenty point deficit to defeat Ball State in double overtime.

I can still remember walking into the ARC’s sweltering lobby from the bitter cold of winter in northwest Indiana. It was a towering brick room, filled with dusty trophies from decades past. The smell of sweat and leather. The communion of a thousand voices gathering to watch a game - our friends and neighbors, my father’s colleagues. The taste of coke and melting ice. The distant sounds of a ball on a hardwood.

It mattered to me if Valpo won or lost. They weren’t some team of players I didn’t know. They were students my father had in class. They were Anthony Allison and Dave Redmon and Chris Ensminger - overachievers who sometimes came over for dinner and let my brother and me ride on their shoulders. Sometimes, they would meet us in the gym and shoot hoops with us. On one memorable occasion, my father convinced Homer - who the whole town was on a first name basis with - to let us ride along on the team bus for a game at Notre Dame.

It mattered if Valpo won or lost because they were all of us - small town kids trying to achieve perfection against all odds, trying to accomplish something no one thought they could accomplish. Looking back, the cynic in me wants to call that cheesy or maudlin. But for anyone who has grown up in a small town, you know that it’s the truth - you want your team to succeed so badly because if they can make it in the big world, so, maybe, can you. And, more importantly, they really were your team. They were players you knew, not just icons fawned over from afar.

In the fall of 1994, when Bryce Drew suited up to play for his father, the Valparaiso Crusaders were a no-name, middling school in the equally middling Mid-Continent Conference. They’d never before won a conference title. The NCAA tournament was a kind of hallowed ground, one that we, as fans, dreamt about but spoke of in quiet, reverent tones. That Valpo - our Valpo - could ever play in the Big Dance, in front of a national audience, seemed ludicrous.

Bryce’s first season, the Crusaders built off of a 2nd place finish the season before. Led by Bryce, and two other Valpo High Graduates - Dave Redmon and Casey Schmidt - the Crusaders won 20 games and the right to host the conference tournament. The people who had packed Viking gym the season before to watch Bryce were now packing the ARC.

Due to a technicality, that year, the winner of the Mid-Continent Conference tournament wouldn’t receive an automatic berth to the NCAA tournament. Still, the conference title game - against Western Illinois - was the first nationally televised game in school history. The ARC was packed to the rafters, the whole town relishing its brief moment in the national spotlight. My father, my brother and I were there, of course. What I remember of the game is how stiflingly hot the gym was. It’s a shame I don’t remember more. It was a three overtime thriller, with Valpo winning 88-85. Hometown kid Redmon blocked a shot at the buzzer to preserve the win. One year after failing in the state title game, Bryce had helped deliver us a title of a different sort.

On Selection Sunday, we all waited to see if, somehow, Valpo could steal an at-large bid to the tournament. When they didn’t, we were disappointed but not surprised. When they didn’t even receive an invitation to the NIT, it seemed like something more onerous - a confirmation of our worst fears. No matter how hard we worked, our efforts would remain invisible to the larger world. For the seniors, like Redmon and Schmidt, who had worked so hard to make the team relevant, their years of work would go unrewarded. They wouldn’t get their one moment in the Big Dance. And this triggered a deeper fear: that Bryce, our local hero, might be doomed to toil in obscurity.



~



Things weren’t much better for Tim Bishop. Playing with the Mets rookie league affiliate, Tim hit a meager .237 during his first season of pro ball. Despite the fact that he had been a late round draft choice, everyone in Valpo expected that he would excel the way he had in high school. He’d almost always been the best athlete on the field - be it the hardwood, the gridiron, or the diamond. It was humbling to see the best we had to offer struggle so mightily.



~



Bryce’s sophomore year was even more successful than his freshman season. Valpo again won the regular season conference title, and stormed into the conference tournament as the favorite to finally clinch the first NCAA bid in school history. Once again, they were matched up with Western Illinois. This time, though, the game would be on unfamiliar territory. The tournament was held at the Mark of the Quad Cities in Moline, Illinois. It’s a four and a half hour drive from Valparaiso. And yet, for the championship game, thousands of Valpo fans made the trip down for the game.

It was, I should add, a Tuesday night.

With the school’s first tournament bid on the line, the Crusaders played a remarkably easy game. Unlike the year before, it was a rout. By halftime, the celebration was on in the stands. We all stayed after the final buzzer to watch as the team - and especially senior small forward, Anthony Allison, a long time student of my father’s - cut down the nets, donned hats, and posed with the league championship trophy.

On the drive back from Moline, I was too excited to sleep. I stumbled into school the next day - I was in fourth grade - bleary eyed but elated.



~



We filled the ARC for Selection Sunday. The pep band blared. Homer and some of the players gave speeches. Thousands of us were there, watching the proceedings on a projector screen. When CBS called our name, we didn’t even care that they pronounced it Valpa-rize-o. We roared. We were the 14th seed, heading out west to play Arizona. That week, dreams of upsets danced in our - or at least my - head. It didn’t matter that Arizona was playing two hours from home, or a nationally ranked powerhouse. We had the Mid-Con player of the year, in Allison - and more importantly, we had Bryce.

“Maybe, if we win, they’ll finally pronounce our name right,” my father joked as we settled in to watch the game. My heart was pounding through my chest. My father opened a beer, and paced the room. Valpo came out and played as if they were as nervous as we were. Arizona scored the first seven points of the game. Valpo turned the ball over at a prodigious rate, threw up multiple air balls. It’s maybe the most lopsided game I’ve ever seen. By halftime, we trailed 51-15. CBS’s coverage switched to another game about midway through the second half - a final, pointed insult to our national embarrassment.

“What are you doing in the NCAA tournament?” the Chicago Tribune wondered. Unfortunately, even the most die-hard Valpo fan had been forced to ask the same question.



~



It’s strange, looking back, at how much the games meant - not just to me and my brother, but to my father, and his friends and colleagues. When Valpo lost, especially at home, I felt deflated for the next day or so. After a home loss, the ARC was as quiet as a mausoleum. When they won, the elation I felt would be matched, later in life, only by the euphoria of falling in love.

My father, years later, would confess to me the level of his own devotion. “I would lose sleep when they lost. I would toss and turn and replay the game in my head. It was perverse. I was a grown man, a professional, and yet this team mattered so much to me. I knew it shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help it. And I wasn’t alone. Half the faculty was the same way.”



~



Despite the embarrassment of the Arizona loss, there were plenty of positives. For starters, Bryce was only a sophomore. He still had two more years to develop. And Bryce hadn’t been our only promising sophomore. Jamie Sykes had proven himself a capable backcourt mate. Although he didn’t have much of a scoring touch, he was a reliable ball handler, and despite being only 5’11”, a smart and fierce defender. Tony Vilcinskas was a gargantuan, 7-foot Lithuanian. Although he hadn’t yet developed a soft touch around the basket - and often committed infuriating fouls - his size added real presence in the paint. It was a presence few mid-majors had. And lastly there were the twins, Bill and Bob Jenkins. Identical small forwards, they were defensive specialists, and provided athleticism off the bench.

But perhaps the best news came from off the hardwood. That summer, Tim Bishop rebounded from his disastrous first pro-season. Splitting time between rookie ball and Single A, Tim hit a stellar .317. He was only 19. He’d proven, to all of us at home, that his initial struggles had been a fluke. He was, we all assumed, well on his way to the majors.



~



Bryce’s junior season, Valpo won 24 games, and beat Western Illinois, yet again, to clinch the Mid-Con’s automatic berth into the NCAA tournament. Whereas the year before there had been unbridled, perhaps naïve optimism, this year, there was a quiet confidence. Valpo had only lost 6 games all season, and had three separate 5 game winning streaks. And they’d proved they could hang with the blue bloods: in the first game of the season, they’d gone on the road to Vanderbilt and nearly won.

They were rewarded with a 12 seed, and a date with Boston College. It was the day’s early game, which meant that I was going to be stuck at school. Thankfully, this was Indiana. Although there was no official mandate from the principal, I think if we hadn’t been allowed to watch the game, there would have been a student mutiny. So after lunch, every classroom at Cook’s Corners Elementary School closed its door, and quietly turned the television to CBS.

Valpo jumped out to an 11 point lead. Although Boston College closed the gap, midway through the second half, Valpo still controlled the game. Bryce was unconscious, scoring 19 points in the first half, and making 6 treys. With just under four minutes left in the game, the final bell rang, ending the school day. My teacher - a stolid, witch of a woman - informed us that no one would be staying late to watch the game. There followed a frenzy through the hallways the likes of which I’d never seen before: hundreds of elementary school kids, all decked in gold and brown, sprinting down hallways that were slick as ice, trying to get to their bus.

I climbed aboard bus 22 out of breath. Ms. Tucker, my benevolent, behemoth of a driver, smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered,” she said, her voice gravelly from decades of cigarettes. The radio blasted through the bus with the familiar voice of Todd Ickow, Valpo’s long time play-by-play man.

It was an excruciating bus ride. Although Valpo kept it close, Boston College finally pulled away in the game’s final minutes. I remember sprinting off the bus in the game’s last seconds, wanting to be alone so that I could burst into tears. Sure, I wanted to take it as a moral victory. We’d hung with one of the blue bloods, scared the hell out of them. But we’d been so close! And even though Bryce would be coming back - even though four of our starters would be coming back - life in mid-major college basketball is tenuous. Chances that remarkable didn’t just present themselves every year. All it would take was one bad bounce, one missed call…there was no guarantee, even with Bryce, that we’d be dancing again next year. We might very well have let our best - our only opportunity - slip through our fingers.

“A 41-point loss to Arizona in Valpo's first NCAA appearance made a lot of people wonder whether the tiny Indiana school belonged on college basketball's biggest stage,” the Chicago Tribune wrote on March 14. “No one's wondering now. The 12th-seeded Crusaders threw a fright into Boston College before losing 73-66 Thursday in the opening round of the West Regional…The biggest question facing Valpo this time was: How did you let the Big East champs off the hook?”



~



About a month after the Boston College loss, my brother and I were visiting our grandparents in Appleton, Wisconsin. We were driving through the rolling glacial hills, on our way to Green Bay. My Grandfather had the radio turned to WTMJ, Milwaukee’s talk radio station. It was an unseasonably warm day, I remember. Even with the air conditioning on, the car was stifling. My brother and I were both on the verge of drifting to sleep.

We were listening, I think, to a Brewers game. Then, I remember a newscaster interrupted the broadcast. His voice was somber. He mentioned something about a professional baseball player being killed in a tragic accident. A minor leaguer. I sat up, piqued in that way all kids are by death, and especially death that takes someone as seemingly invulnerable as a professional athlete.

“He was with the New York Mets farm club in South Carolina,” the announcer said. “His name was Tim Bishop, from Valparaiso, Indiana.”



~



The funeral was held a week later, at Valparaiso University’s Chapel of The Resurrection. It’s a towering, cavernous structure, with vaulted ceilings and ten-story stained glass windows. It resembles a star rising from the prairie. And for Tim Bishop’s funeral, it was packed. His sisters eulogized him, and read poems he had written. ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’ was played on the organ. His high school teammates were among his pallbearers.

It’s hard to understand, unless you’ve experienced it, the shock that comes from the death of a young person in a small town. It’s even harder when that young man was as gifted and as promising as Tim Bishop. Moments that had seemed inconsequential become fraught with meaning. People come out of the wood work with stories and anecdotes.

In some ways, I am one of those people. Tim Bishop attended my childhood church, Christ Lutheran. But if I ever met him, I can’t remember it. I only saw him play basketball a few times, and those memories are hazy, at best. The fact is, this is probably how most people in Valparaiso knew Tim Bishop. We knew of his myth, but we didn’t know him. And yet what he represented was so important to us. He was the good, generous kid who came from a religious family. He was the three sport star who never stopped working to improve. He was what all of us aspired to be: the kid who hit the most famous shot in town; the kid, who when all was said and done, would escape Valparaiso, Indiana, and make a name for himself out in the larger world.

Most small towns, all over the country, have legends like this. They’re important. They help us to orient ourselves. They help us to dream. But few of those legends end as tragically as Tim Bishop’s. Death, of course, is an inevitable part of life. No matter how much we try to distract ourselves, it finds ways to remind us of its infallibility. Often times, it takes the best of us. And when it does, we all feel that void inside ourselves - that inherent wound that is our own mortality. If death can take Tim Bishop, that void whispers, it can take me, or you.

We are left, in the wake of such tragedies, struggling to fill that void in ourselves. Some of us seek fulfillment in faith. Others take solace in family, or work. And in a place like Valparaiso, many of us turn to basketball.



~



As the summer waned, and the wound from Tim’s death began to heal, Valpo once again turned its attention to the other local hero, the hero we had for one more year. After the near miss against Boston College, expectations for the Crusaders were almost impossibly high. It was the senior year for the most successful class in school history. They’d won the conference. They’d gone to the Dance. They’d proved they belonged in the Dance. But there was still one glaring hole in their resume: they hadn’t won a game in the tournament. It’s the thing that sets mid-major programs like Valpo apart. Plenty of good basketball teams make the tournament, scare a major program, and are then never heard from again. But if you can win a game…well, then it’s a different story. Then, people remember you. If you win a game in the NCAA tournament, people learn how to pronounce your name right.

Almost from the outset, the season seemed cursed. Bryce missed the first game of the season with a hamstring injury. No matter, we all thought - it was a warm up affair against NAIA Bethel. The ARC was maybe half full. And then Valpo lost - by ten.

Two days later, eighth-ranked Purdue came to the ARC. It was a date that had long been circled on every fan’s calendar - an early season home game against a top-10 team. It would be an opportunity to prove Valpo’d grown from the Boston College loss, and could compete with the country‘s best. The ARC was overflowing, and rollicking. But when the team came out for warm-ups, there was Bryce, wearing a suit. We never had a chance. Purdue jumped out to a big first half lead, and coasted the rest of the way. With five minutes left, most of the crowd had left.

The loudest ovation of the game came at halftime, when Bryce, in his suit, stepped to center court. He took a microphone and apologized for being unable to play. He knew what the game meant to us.

Bryce’s first game of the season was ten days later, against the 15th ranked Stanford Cardinal. It was Valpo’s second game in the Maui Invitational, and it didn’t tip-off until midnight. After much begging and pleading with my mother, she finally agreed to let me and my brother stay awake to listen to the game with our father. The three of us huddled around the radio in my bedroom, sitting Indian style on the floor. It was a riveting, agonizing game. Still hampered by his injury, Bryce scored 25 points in only 18 minutes. Stanford had no answer for him on defense. The only thing that kept Stanford in the game was unbelievably lopsided officiating. The Cardinal attempted an almost unfathomable 48 free throws on the night, and Valpo had three starters, and two reserves, foul out. With each mounting fall, the three of us fell to the floor, groaning in agony. With each Bryce three, we rejoiced and high fived - but quietly, so as not to wake my mother or young sister. In the end, once again, the victory over a major program proved elusive. Stanford held on, 70-65. But for those of us who stayed up to listen all the way back in Valpo, we felt encouraged. With Bryce back, we could compete.

And yet despite Bryce finally being healthy, and despite starting four seniors, the team continued to falter. A loss at St. Louis on January 26 dropped Valpo to 10-10 on the season. They already had three losses in conference play. More and more, the season resembled a nightmare.



~



Part of the joy of watching a small college basketball team is watching each individual class grow as a unit. At the upper echelon of the game, there’s so much turnover between seasons, that it’s rare to have players who develop together, who come into their own together.

But at smaller schools, like Valpo, you notice how the players develop their games, and this further endears you to them. We all noticed when, between his junior and senior seasons, Bill Jenkins improved his three point shooting. We noticed when Jamie got better at the free throw line. We noticed when Tony’s touch around the rim softened. It proved to all of us that these guys were the kind of players we hoped they’d be - the kind of players that we would be, if given the opportunity. They spent the long, sweaty hours in the gym when no one was around to see. They worked to improve their games even though they weren’t playing on national television, even if most of them weren’t going to have professional careers. They worked because they loved the game as much as we loved the game. And, we liked to believe, they worked because they knew how much them winning mattered to us. But there’s a fine line between those expectations - the weight of a town’s hopes, if you will - motivating a team, and crushing them.



~



On January 29, Valpo beat Northern Illinois. They wouldn’t lose again for the rest of the regular season. They rolled off nine straight conference wins to clinch yet another Mid-Continent Conference regular season title - the fourth for Bryce, Jamie, Bill, Bob, and Tony.

On February 25th, Bryce Drew played his last game in Valparaiso, Indiana. I was there with my father and my brother. Half the town, it seemed, had crammed into the little gym. Bryce didn’t send us home disappointed. He made one three-ponter…and then another…and another. He made nine in all, and scored 33 points. The ovation, when he finally came out, was extraordinary.

A week later, Valpo coasted to another Mid-Con tournament championship. They’d reeled off 11 wins in a row. On Selection Sunday, we gathered once more in the ARC to learn our fate.

Friday, March 13. Oklahoma City. 4th seeded Mississippi, champions of the SEC.

There would be one last chance - for a town, for a team, for a father and son - to show what tiny Valparaiso was capable of.



~



You can find the shot on Youtube, if you want. As a sports fan, it’s one of the wonders of this age. Almost any moment, no matter how obscure, can be unearthed, relived, immortalized. They huddle beneath the court at Mackey Arena. Tim and Bryce sit next to each other on the bench. Bryce is scrawny, and looks like a very young kid. It’s jarring, all these years later, to see how young he looks. But Tim, even at that age, is a presence. On the court, he paces impatiently during stoppages of play. He’s well built, broad in the shoulders. They break the huddle, take to the court. They wear mesh green jerseys, and shorts that, nowadays, are almost comically short and tight. The scoreboard shows the tally: East Chicago Central 82, Valparaiso 81. There are 2.8 seconds left. The crowd throbs with nervous anticipation. You can feel, just through their noise, what this means - the pride that’s at stake, the years upon years of AAU practices and meals eaten on the road, the hours of sleep lost. Furlin takes the ball beneath the hoop. Tim curls off a screen, catches the ball on the right block and in one motion, he rises. Two defenders collapse on him almost immediately. One seems to have him blanketed so thoroughly that it seems impossible he could ever get a shot off. But somehow, there it goes - kissing sweetly off the glass, rattling home. The kind of shot that’s instinctive, that comes from years upon years of repetition - of knowing the exact weight of the shot, the exact spot on the board you need to hit.

“Oh my gawsh, he hit it!” the announcer squeals, his voice breaking, a man with a long, lilting prairie voice. On the court, Tim throws his arms in the air. He jumps up, once, with pure joy. He bends his knees, and once more, leaps as high as he can into the air. The video cuts to the Valpo crowd, a faceless horde, clad in white. They mob one another, falling over each other in paroxysms of unbridled ecstasy. You think: how can this possibly mean so much?

You watch it, again and again. He curls and catches. He shoots. The ball rattles home. The announcer’s voice breaks. And then he jumps into the air as high as he can, an Indiana boy living the fantasy of Indiana boys everywhere. How many times did he imagine this moment in his driveway at home? How many times, with the day failing, his dinner getting cold, did he take the ball, and begin the countdown. Three, two, one… The ball settles through the basket, and he jumps into the late day light. He’s alone, there’s no one to see - no one but his father, watching surreptitiously from just inside the front door. How many times? you wonder.



~



Valparaiso - Ole Miss tipped off shortly after noon. I was sitting in my sixth grade English classroom. The television blinked silently in the corner while we - ostensibly - sat quietly and read. The book, I believe, was Gary Paulsen’s ‘The Hatchet.’ And yet with every Valpo basket, we cheered softly, until finally, our teacher relented, told us to put our books away, and turned the volume up.

From the outset, it was clear Valpo wasn’t overmatched. We jumped out to an early nine point lead before things tightened at halftime. The second half saw the lead see-saw back and forth. As the clock began ticking its way down, the classroom grew quieter and quieter. Four years of dreaming would come down to whether our seniors could execute in the final four minutes.

At one point, I remember going to the bathroom. Every classroom in school was glued to the television. The hallways were the emptiest, and quietest, I’d ever seen them.

With two minutes left in the game, the period ended. What ensued was another mad dash in the hallways as we all tried to reach our next class. Mine happened to be gym. My best friend and I ran through the halls together. We had a moment of panic. “There are no TV’s in the gym,” my friend said. “What are we going to do?”

We found our teacher standing in the hallway outside the locker room, a boom box on his shoulder. He smiled. He was a tall, lean, tan man, his teeth brutally white. “Did you really think I’d let you guys miss the end of this game?” he said. And so it was that sixty 6th grade boys piled, appropriately, onto our basketball court to listen to the final minute of the most important game of our lives.

Down two, with forty-five seconds left, we missed two wide open looks at three-pointers. It was impossible for me, in those moments, not to think back to that State title game four years before. It was impossible not to think about the disaster against Arizona, the close call against Boston College. It was impossible not to think about Tim Bishop. It was impossible not to think about Bryce spurning bigger schools because he wanted to play for his father, in his hometown.

With eight seconds left, Bryce missed a wide open three pointer. Ansu Sesay, the SEC player of the year, grabbed the rebound, and with four seconds left, was fouled. I think all of us - in the gym, in the town - hung our heads. I felt something substantial go out of me - a faith, if you will; a belief in stories. We’d done everything right. Bryce had done everything right. And in the end, we would still fall short. In the end, we weren’t quite good enough.

Sesay, Todd Ickow informed us, was a 74% free throw shooter. He stepped to the foul line with a chance to end our season, our years of dreaming. And then he missed the first free throw. In our gym, some of us perked up. There was still hope. Homer called his final timeout. After an excruciating commercial break, Sesay stepped back to the line.

He missed that one, too. Eickow held his breath while the ball was tipped.

“Valpo ball,” he breathlessly informed us.

A few of us clapped or yelped.

What had been 4 seconds was now a mere 2.5. We were 94 feet from our basket, down 2. Anyone who knows basketball - and who knows basketball better than a 12 year old Indiana boy? - understands the difficulty of the situation. There is hope, of course. There is always hope. It‘s why we watch sports, after all - because we hope to experience something rare and sublime. Because we hope to witness our team win on a miracle against all odds. So yes, there was still hope. But it’s hope that was only slightly more than a prayer.

So I did what probably the whole town of Valparaiso did. I closed my eyes, and I prayed.



~



You can find this video on Youtube, too. Hell, you can find it a dozen times on Youtube. But there’s only one video with Todd Ickow’s call, the call that I heard sitting in my middle school gymnasium with sixty of my classmates.

“Sykes, fakes, fakes…” Eickow begins while Jamie Sykes, all 5 foot 11 of him, pumps his right arm, duping his 6’4” defender into the air. “A long pass..” as Jamie lets the ball fly. “Bill Jenkins, tips to Drew…” as Bill Jenkins leaps over two taller defenders and, in one motion, tips the ball to Bryce Drew streaking down the sideline, just feet from his father. “Drew, three for the wiiiin,” Eickow implores, his voice drawing itself out in a plea.

We waited, opened our eyes.

“Goooooooood!” Eickow wails, his voice shattering. “Valpo wins! Valpo wins! Valpo wins!”

In my gymnasium - and in every classroom and every living room and every bar of my hometown - there was only pandemonium. There was a pile of bodies, hugs, high fives.

Valpo, finally, had won.



~



In Oklahoma City, Bryce Drew did what I would do an hour later, when I finally burst in my front door: he embraced his father.

O.K., my father and I might have run around our house screaming at the top of our lungs. But we embraced, too.



~



Two days later, Valpo would beat Florida State in overtime to advance to the Sweet Sixteen. That week, when the team returned from Oklahoma City, ESPN and CBS and every other news outlet in America had come to Valparaiso - and they finally learned how to pronounce our name right, too.

A week later, my whole family made the trip with over 5000 fans to St. Louis, where Valpo would play Rhode Island. The odds are, you don’t know how that game ended. That’s because, this time, there was no miracle. Down 3, with 45 seconds left, Bryce missed a three from almost exactly the same spot he’d made from the week before. This time, Rhode Island made their free throws.

And just like that, it was over.

We didn’t want it to end. This team, this player, had meant so much to us. We’d watched him for eight years. While the jubilant Rhode Island fans filed out of the arena, we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave. So we did the only thing we could think to do: all 5000 of us stood up, and we cheered. And we kept cheering. For fifteen minutes, we cheered, and we chanted. And finally, the team came back out. They went to center court. We stood, and we cheered. They waved - Jamie and Tony, Bill and Bob. Bryce.

And then they disappeared down the tunnel.



~



What does it matter, in the end?

The odds are, if you’re reading this article, you know where Valparaiso is. And you know where Valpo is because Bryce hit his shot. It’s a small thing, sure. But to those of us who grew up there, or lived there, it meant something: to be recognized, to be known.

This week, it’s likely you’ll see highlights of Bryce’s shot. It happened fifteen years ago. And the son who hit the shot is now the coach. He’s led his own team back to the NCAA Tournament, that hallowed ground where small schools and towns can, for at least a few hours, dream of glory.

I’ll be watching, too, even though I moved away from Valparaiso twelve years ago. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that Valpo is still something of a way station. It is, probably, not the kind of place one imagines their life culminating. Looking back, it’s clear to me now that life in Valpo was especially hard on my father. He’d grown up in a place like Valpo, and had dreamed of living a life away from such Midwestern backwaters.

At the risk of offending people I love, and the town I once called home, Valparaiso is the kind of place where you end up if you grow up there, or if you’re passing through - presumably on the way to somewhere bigger and brighter - and you wind up getting stranded. It’s the kind of place where ambitions moderate, where you take solace in the quotidian rituals of community. It’s the kind of place where a basketball team can mean everything.

Over the next few weeks, you and I and everyone else are going to be bombarded by the twenty-four hour entertainment machine that now surrounds the NCAA Tournament. There will be brackets galore, advertisements from sponsors paying millions or billions for air time, and young men playing out the string before they can make the next leap and start making their own millions - all to play a game. Sports, we can all admit, are a mess. Tradition is now a marketing tool. Players make too much money in a world where billions are starving. The major events are hyped and re-hyped to the point of exhaustion. It’s easy to forget why we watch in the first place.

But then, on the first Thursday or Friday of March Madness, some small school from a place no one’s ever heard of - Hampton or Bucknell or Valparaiso - will hang around with one of the blue bloods, one of the schools that reaps the benefits of all those ad dollars. And more often than not, the blue bloods hang on. The final shot rims out. But every once in a while, those final seconds tick down, and something so unexpected and sublime happens - and we remember where we were when we witnessed it, who we were with, how elated we felt.

If you don’t believe me, take a drive through Valparaiso this week. Somewhere, on the streets, I bet you’ll find an eleven year old kid and his younger brother. They know the name Bryce Drew - and maybe, hopefully, they know the name Tim Bishop, too. Maybe they overheard their father reminiscing about Tim with his friends. Maybe they’ve even seen the video of Tim’s shot on Youtube.

The day is dying on them, these brothers. They‘re shooting hoops, of course. Their father is calling from the kitchen that dinner’s ready. They keep begging for five more minutes, just five more minutes. Finally they’re out of time. They have one last shot left. The older brother passes to the younger. Sykes, fakes, fakes, a long pass, he begins. The younger brother tips the ball back. Bill Jenkins, tips to Drew, he says. The older brother catches the ball on the right wing. He plants, squares his shoulders instinctively. He’s practiced his whole life for this shot. Drew, a three for the win... The ball comes off his hands perfectly. He feels it slice through the net. Then, he dives headfirst to the ground and his brother piles on top of him, and they laugh together, allowing themselves, for at least the moment, to dream.