ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — On its first gameday of the season, the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team left the floor with slumped shoulders and long faces, the only sound coming from the low hum of the lights inside an empty Reilly Center.
On that dismal December afternoon, you might recall, Bona was going to finally open this pandemic-altered year against Saint Francis.
It had donned at least its home white game shorts and taken the floor for its pregame shootaround. It could taste this first opportunity at a real contest for the first time in over nine months. Then, a Saint Francis player had a day-of COVID-19 test come back positive.
And just like that, a mere hour-and-a-half before tip, the game was called and the Bonnies went back in waiting.
For the first month, this Bona season had disaster written all over it, the potential to be over, forgotten, buried in the same way that the end of 2019-20 had been — before it even began.
Coach Mark Schmidt’s team learned of its own series of positive tests on Nov. 19, just five days before it was set to open the campaign at the “Bubbleville” event in Connecticut, causing the cancelation of its first four non-league games. Next came a nearly three-week quarantine period and the cancelation of the Saint Francis contest. Later, it had its anticipated rivalry matchup with Buffalo wiped out due to a positive test within the UB camp just one day before.
BY CHRISTMAS, the Bonnies had played just two games — two in the 70 days since starting practice — saw six canceled, had two players leave the program (with a third to follow shortly thereafter) and were still far from being in the physical shape they would have expected to be.
They, also, were all at their individual homes for Christmas, separated once again by time and space.
In those days before their next contest — a conference-opening loss to Rhode Island — they could have easily given up on this season, gone through the motions knowing that they’d already been granted an extra year of eligibility and were all going to be back as seniors the following year anyway.
They could have simply said, “this ain’t it,” and nobody would have blamed them.
Of course, they didn’t do that.
Instead of sulking at what they had lost, they decided to seize the opportunities, as unpromised as they were, that lie ahead.
“WE WERE really looking forward to going out to Connecticut,” junior forward Jalen Adaway recently acknowledged. “We kind of got down, but in a good way, because we knew that once we got out of quarantine, we had to really cherish each and every game that we were going to get to play because we didn’t know how many we were going to get to play or if we were even going to get the chance to play.
“Once we got that first game in, we just treated every game like it was just our last, just try to leave it all out there.”
Dominick Welch echoed that sentiment. Bona had been working for this season — in person and on Zoom — since March 12, he noted, the day last year’s Atlantic 10 Tournament was canceled. And it didn’t intend on throwing in the towel just because the non-conference didn’t go as planned.
“(Coach) always says, appreciate every game, because you never know when it’s your last this year,” the junior guard said recently. “Even though games (had been) getting postponed and canceled, we just appreciate every game that we get and try to keep the right mindset going into a game that we’re going to play, even though it may get canceled.
“We always just try to keep our spirits high. It’s frustrating sometimes, but we always try to stick together and look for better days.”
And those better days have arrived.
ON THIS last gameday of the season, the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team left the floor with smiling faces and heads held high, the cacophonous sound coming from the few hundred fans embracing them as they stood and danced on one of the sideline tables inside Dayton Arena.
On that merry March afternoon, Bona defeated VCU, 74-65, for the second A-10 Tournament title in program history.
And, in that moment, it was hard not to consider just how far this team had come over a tumultuous four months.
On November 14, Bona was just five days from having to pause indefinitely, facing the very real prospect of another stolen season due to the pandemic. On March 14, it was cutting a net down in its championship t-shirts and hats, basking in what it had not allowed the pandemic to take away.
This could well have been a season that matched the mood that had hovered over the Reilly Center through Christmas and New Year’s.
Instead, incredibly, it became one of the all-time (though compact) SBU seasons, one that, pound for pound, might have even surpassed what Bona did just three years ago and trailed only the Final Four campaign of 1969-’70, the unbeaten regular season of 1967-’68 and the 24-4 campaign of 1960-61 (a team that finished No. 3 nationally) in terms of overall greatness.
What would it have meant to win an A-10 championship with everything that had transpired this winter?
It answered that question with its performance Sunday against the Rams.
“It would ultimately just be a great feeling,” junior guard Jaren Holmes said before his team took the floor that day. “With us not having fans at all this year, it means that much more that we would be able to celebrate it next year with them. This community does everything for us, they love us, they always support us through thick and thin. So it would just mean a lot, not just only for us, but for the university and the community around it.
“A lot of people have a lot of things to say about Olean — it’s a ghost town and things like that. But the people here are wonderful and they always treat us with nothing but respect. So it would just be another great moment — not only for us as a group, but for Dr. (Dennis) DePerro (the school president who had recently passed) and his family.”
