FAIRFIELD, Conn. -- Months ago, just before the basketball season began, Mount St. Mary's coach Milan Brown asked his players to do more this year than dream.
It was time to believe.
It was time to believe that, when the conference tournament was over, they would be the team cutting down the nets and going to the NCAA tournament. Didn't matter that the Mountaineers had only one senior in their main rotation. Didn't matter that they went 11-20 the season before or that the program had not had a winning record since 1996-97. It was time to set that lofty goal and then work hard enough to make it happen.
Improbably, it did.
As Brown held his 2-year-old daughter, Nyla, in his arms Wednesday night inside the Pitt Center - minutes after Mount St. Mary's had wrapped up an emotional victory over Sacred Heart in the Northeast Conference tournament championship game - he smiled as he watched his team dance and laugh and snap pictures. Tears fell, confetti floated through the air, but so did, metaphorically speaking, the sense of accomplishment.
"Man, this feels really good," Brown said in his post-game news conference, proudly sporting his Northeast Conference champion hat. "I'm exhausted, but it's a good exhausted."
For his players, it was simply a confirmation of all their hard work this season.
"This is what we expected. We feel we were the No. 1 team in the conference, and this proved that," said Kelly Beidler, who scored 15 points in the 68-55 win. "We just shocked everyone, but it wasn't a shock to us."
What happens next is, in some ways, just icing on the cake in Brown's eyes. Because the Northeast Conference doesn't have the strongest ranking in the Rating Percentage Index, Mount St. Mary's might end up in the NCAA's dreaded play-in game, held Tuesday in Dayton, Ohio, to decide the final spot in the 64-team field.
It's a game that's often seen as a dubious honor, considering one of the teams involved won't get a chance to bask in all of the excitement of traveling to the first-round site of the NCAA tournament. But Brown doesn't see it that way.
"At this point, I don't care where we play," Brown said. "I think we had the toughest RPI in our conference, so we'll see. We just want to keep playing."
The toughest challenge, right now, might be scouting the Mountaineers' next opponent. If Mount St. Mary's does find out Sunday night that it has landed in the play-in game, it will be difficult to get video in just one day of the opposing team. But Brown has a secret weapon hard at work on the task.
"I put my wife [Tina] to work taping all the conference championship games that are on TV," Brown said with a grin. "She knows all the conferences now. Hopefully we'll get lucky and we'll have some tape."
kevin.vanvalkenburg @baltsun.com
