“I won championships on a high school level, college level and professional level. And my collegiate championship meant the most to me. I speak to zero of my high school teammates. Zero of my professional teammates. And I still speak to a lot of my former college teammates. This is a special moment for you guys. I hope you guys realize that. This will forever bond you guys.”
Speedy Claxton was talking to us, too.
This is all going to sound like hogwash to people who were already or have grown hardened over the last quarter-century, or were already there or well on their way in 2001. But this isn’t for them and they’re probably not reading anyway.
This may also sound like hogwash to Claxton, who might read this (he probably won’t, he’s a little busy right now) and arch his eyebrow upward like he did when he was reminded following Tuesday night’s win that the Dutchmen were picked eighth this season. It wouldn’t be the first time he gave me that look.
But if you’re a Hofstra person — from a superstar point guard to a high socks-wearing sportswriter with a suspect, well, everything and everyone in between — then you learned long ago that choosing to come to a place where things are hard-earned and do not come easy is a rewarding and molding experience.
If you choose to root for the sports teams, it delivers an experience much more meaningful than any high school alma mater or favorite professional team. It delivers an experience that mirrors life, especially once the darkness and coldness — a combination of hue and temperature we never experienced in college and were naive enough to think we’d never experience — begins feeling more acute as we get older.
Sometimes, the 10,000-foot view is particularly bleak. Sometimes, the micro difficulties are even more existential.
Continuing this week's theme of eerily prescient anniversaries, the last time the Dutchmen played in an NCAA Tournament game was Mar. 15, 2001. Anyone who took off his or her shoes going through airport security looked like a weirdo. My mother, gone 17 years ago yesterday, and my mother-in-law, gone seven years ago Mar. 3, were happy and healthy.
For the Flying Dutchmen, there were challenges far less profound but still jarring in their own way. Tom Pecora acknowledges now he shouldn’t have left. Nobody’s come up with any good reason why Tim Welsh had to be hired after a six-day search, which was only 27 days fewer than his tenure. (Full disclosure: I wanted to believe, too) The Mo Cassara era began with the most exuberant season of the CAA era and ended with the most depressing season in school history.
The two best men’s basketball teams of the CAA era didn’t get to play in the NCAA Tournament for almost unfathomably unfair reasons — first because of a dirty athletic director within the CAA whose school made a Cinderella Final Four run at Hofstra’s expense, then because a global pandemic forced the cancellation of the tournament fewer than 48 hours after the Dutchmen finally won the CAA for the first time.
Months later, any hope for a reasonably satisfying repeat title disappeared when Joe Mihalich suffered a stroke. Another coaching change, this one filled with unavoidable awkwardness and bruised feelings, ensued when Mihalich retired following the 2020-21 season.
And there were other heartbreaks and frustrations endured throughout the athletic department. It would have been easy to move on from Hofstra sports, to either punt rooting for college athletics entirely or to focus our attentions more casually on a power program for whom things are automatically made easier.
But to give up on Flying Dutch athletics would have been giving up on Hofstra, shedding all we’d learned during our on-campus experiences and quitting on one of life’s less consequential but no less symbolic or essential battles.
It would have been losing the hope that someday there is a reward for perseverance — for belief, for faith and a deeper devotion that may waver but never breaks, even as the joys grow further in the rearview mirror while the sorrows, consequential and inconsequential alike, pile up.
It would have been giving up on the idea that those sorrows, regardless of scale, will amplify the joy, however and wherever it appears. It would have cost us the chance to bask in the reward of Tuesday night — a multi-generational experience that was impossible to envision in 2001.
We never would have gotten the opportunity to sense the giddiness that comes every time we see Hofstra listed amongst the automatic bid winners, the extra investment in bracketology or the anticipation of Selection Sunday and the eagerness to enter a thousand or so pools because this is the time we can finally pick Hofstra to win a game or six.
With the Flying Dutchwomen mounting a Cinderella run to the CAA title game at the same site the men exorcised their demons, we would have missed the surreal nature of the entire week and the possibility this symbolizes a renaissance for a typically hard-luck athletic program. We would have missed the broader glimmers of hope in an era in which you’d have to be willfully blind and numb to not see the darkness and feel the iciness from the 10,000-foot view.
These Flying Dutchmen will always be linked to and bonded with each other, a forever reminder of all they’ve done and invested. Their reward is one for which we will also be forever grateful, filling us with an almost unspeakable joy that affirms our faith and devotion — and reinforces, yet again, that it remains the best investment we could have ever made.
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