With only two minutes remaining on the game clock, UMBC and New Hampshire were tied at 54. For New Hampshire, it would be a huge upset on the road, a couple of hours in the making. For the Retrievers, with a conference title possibly just two minutes away, we were watching school history, several years in the making.
For me, though, tired and dazed, with that eau de locker room smell emanating from my pores, it had been a long day of basketball - eight hours in the making, in fact.
The stars had lined up perfectly yesterday, and in Baltimore, we had five area schools hosting games. I filled the tank up with gas, scribbled out an itinerary and was ready to OD on some mid-major hoops. It was to be a day without TV timeouts, but as I would find later, still very much a race against the clock. My goal was simple: five basketball games, one day.
When I walked into Reitz Arena, shortly before 1 p.m., the two teams were going through warm-ups. Loyola was about to host the UC Davis Aggies, who traveled more than 2,700 miles to be here. Gracious hosts that they are, the Loyola students spent two hours barking out bits of California culture gleaned from television - rants about skateboarding and surfing, Saved by the Bell, 90210, Ashton Kutcher and The O.C.
It was difficult to find suspense in this first game. Even when UC Davis built an 11-point lead, I had a hard time believing the Aggies might pull it out. My grim prognosis had little to do with the fact that they dressed only eight players. I ruled them out by scanning the media guide and studying the Aggies' majors - philosophy, textiles and clothing, viticulture and enology, managerial economics? No, this wasn't Memphis.
Loyola held on to win, 67-64, and the biggest challenge of my day hit me in the face when I returned to my car. Three of the five games tipped off at the same time, which meant that for the next two hours, I would have to race all over town.
I flipped on the car radio and learned that the Maryland men's basketball team trailed Miami late in the first half. That game was way down in Coral Gables, Fla.; my internal GPS told me it was probably too far to squeeze into the day's schedule. Instead, my next stop was the Hampton-Coppin State game.
As I cut through the city, I found myself driving from Anne Tyler's Baltimore to David Simon's. I traded $7 for a ticket and unloaded an electronics store from my pockets before passing through a metal detector. Inside the gym, the crowd was as lively as anything I would see all day.
