ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — It’s a peculiar component in this prolonged, and sometimes difficult to fathom, period of greatness:

A growing number of the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team’s biggest moments have come not in front of its adoring fan base, on the road or in the Reilly Center, but rather as a team, out of uniform and behind closed doors.

The Bonnies were getting ready to board their plane after a 76-67 road triumph over Saint Louis when they learned they’d won a share of the 2015-16 Atlantic 10 regular season title. They watched from inside the RC’s Hall of Fame, away from the courtside public gathering, as their name was called for the 2018 NCAA Tournament.

They celebrated, briefly, with the throngs of Bona fans in attendance after their First Four victory over UCLA, but with no return trip to Olean, they were mostly left to commemorate that achievement as a team on a redeye flight from Dayton to Dallas.

And so it was on Saturday.

BONA WAS in its home locker room, preparing for practice, when it congregated around a big-screen television for the final few minutes of the Davidson-VCU game. And when the final horn sounded in the Wildcats’ 65-57 triumph, the celebration was on:

The Bonnies were officially Atlantic 10 champions.

Bona, for as much as it talked about needing “another 40 minutes” after Friday’s win over George Washington, didn’t actually have to play again to achieve this next momentous “first” of the Mark Schmidt era. With VCU’s loss (and accompanying 10-4) record, the Bonnies’ mark of either 12-3 or 11-4 will stand as the conference’s best regardless of tonight’s result.

And no matter how it happened, the glittering nature of the feat remains:

It’s Bona’s first outright Atlantic 10 championship in 42 years as a conference member.

“I’m just really happy for our players,” said Schmidt, whose team was showered with messages of congratulations on social media all Saturday and into Sunday. “They work extremely hard and for them to be the first team (to do so) speaks volumes about the type of players and the type of team that we have.”

IT ISN’T just that Bona accomplished something so special in a good year for the A-10, in a trying and wildly unpredictable season due to the pandemic and after losing what many figured to be a pair of starter-types in Justin Winston and Anthony Roberts …

It’s that it continues to pile up these “firsts,” to outdo itself nearly every passing season of Schmidt’s tenure.

Since 2012, that list has included the program’s first Atlantic 10 Tournament title, its first share of a regular season crown, its first NCAA Tournament win in 48 years, its first 26-win season and its first outright league championship. And if it wasn’t the case in 2016, ‘18 or even ‘19, when Bona came within a second-half collapse of an unprecedented second-straight trip to the Big Dance, it certainly is now.

This is as much a “golden era” as any that have come before it.

And these teams, and this 2016-’21 (and almost certainly beyond) era, should, decades from now, probably be talked about and viewed in the same light as those beloved teams from the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

“I talk about consistency all the time,” Schmidt said, when asked to summarize the magnitude of these feats over the last five years, “and a lot of programs can do it for a one-hit wonder, but I think we have a program that we’ve built that has sustained over time. That’s what we’re most proud of — that we’ve built this thing into being competitive, for the most part, every year. (I’m) proud of the staff, the players, the managers, everybody. It takes everybody to do something special like we did.”

Reflecting on what that means from a historical standpoint, he added: “ … and we have a rich tradition. It’s not like this program hasn’t had success, back in the 50s, 60s. For us to do something that nobody else has done in the Atlantic 10, in 40-42 years, (that’s) something that we’re really proud of.”

And that cuts to the heart of the matter.

THIS isn’t another column on the restoration of a “once-proud” program. That story was written in 2012 … and ‘16 … and again in ‘18. These Bonnies are well past that point and winning to this extent, amazingly, has all but become the norm.

But still. Even when Bona was first-proud, in any of its other hey-days (aside from the singular accomplishment of reaching the Final Four in 1970), this would have been almost impossible to imagine … for then or now.

Bona has won 10-plus conference games in seven consecutive seasons, extending what had already been the league’s best mark. It’s a pandemic away from winning 20 or more games in five of six seasons from 2016-’21.

Most absurdly, it’s been in the NCAA Tournament conversation — either in, on the bubble or a win away — in five of 10 seasons since 2011-12. That’s not only crazy given where it was when Schmidt took over, but remarkable in that Bona had made just five NCAA appearances total before his arrival in 2007.

And that’s the be-all for many of the program’s fans and followers today.

His old coaching colleague, Fran Fraschilla, was one of the myriad notable names to chime in after Bona had secured the outright title on Saturday (former star forward Andrew Nicholson was another, asking, ‘How about those Bonnies?’)

“Congrats to Mark Schmidt and the Bonnies,” Fraschilla, now an ESPN college basketball analyst, tweeted. “(He) has built a consistently good, tough team in Olean. Class guy. Coach (Skip) Prosser would be proud.”

And, indeed, Schmidt’s former coaching mentor would be.

(J.P. Butler, Bradford Publishing Company group sports editor, can be reached at jbutler@oleantimesherald.com)