Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young

Diane Lane was my first celebrity crush as a kid, so let me make it abundantly clear I will never ever tire of posting videos from 1984 in which she is lip-syncing to one of my all-time favorite songs in one of my all-time favorite B movies.

But there are some wells you can only go to so many times, so I figured the Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young post the day of a CAA championship game might have run its course in 2020, when the Dutchmen won the title after falling short in 2016 and 2019.

The conference championship drought — lasting exactly 19 years and 6,939 days —  was over. You can’t make every conference championship game the ultimate collective experience in sports fandom and work lyrics from a song that is now more than 40 years old into a blog post.

Except, well, you can, because nights like tonight are timeless…and usually in an inspiring, invigorating and regenerative way. 

Getting ready to watch Hofstra play for an NCAA Tournament bid will never not be nerve-wracking or emotional. It will never not send us to YouTube looking to get ourselves into a teary-eyed frenzy by watching “Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young,” whose 10 million-plus views probably include at least a few hundred thousand from this IP address.

The nostalgia-fueled endorphins generated by watching the Flying Dutchmen play in a conference championship game will never not remind us of when we were in our late teens and early 20s and Hofstra was the canvas on which we were fortunate to try and paint our hopefully limitless futures.

It will never not remind us of who we have become and where we come from. My phone blew up last night with texts from my best Hofstra friends a few towns over, a few states away and half a country away…plus my best friend from Connecticut, a rabid UConn fan who stayed up late to watch the game, possibly to get an idea of what I got myself into when I chose to be a contrarian at 19.

There is no better reminder of the impact Hofstra and Hofstra sports have had on my life than the sights and sounds last night of a teenaged daughter traveling from disinterestedly scrolling on her phone to jumping off the couch and screaming when Preston Edmead hit the shot heard round the basketball world before begging her parents, who met at Hofstra in 1994, to take her to Washington, D.C. today. Sorry Molly. Adulting sometimes sucks.

We understand all too well that it’ll be over before we know it’s begun, and that we must cherish every minute today, because the journey as a mid-major fan is so often the reward — especially when a team in the NIL era mirrors its school like these Flying Dutchmen. 

We can all see a little of ourselves and our Hofstra experiences in German Plotnikov and Silas Sunday, natives of faraway countries who have wrung all they can out of their years here and will identify with Hofstra forever. We can start to see some of Plotnikov and Sunday in Joshua DeCady, who has gone from a deep reserve last year to an indispensable starter this year.

We will never blame anyone for exiting for greener pastures, but we will doubly appreciate those who stayed, like Cruz Davis — and someone like Edmead, who, much like his coach almost 30 years ago, could have left before he even got here.

And maybe this is the junior college grad in me talking, but we will always appreciate players for whom Hofstra is their second, third or fourth stop. Sometimes you have to take a circuitous route to where you were meant to be.

As much as we like to recall our long-ago youth and find some of us in the players not yet born when we were their age, we will always understand nights like tonight are about the players on the court and those who came before them, particularly those who didn’t have the opportunity to play in an NCAA Tournament.

Especially this year.

Mid-major schools fortunate enough to reach the NCAA Tournament always get to revel in their accomplishment for several days or more before experiencing an essential bittersweet coda to their story. As Kyle Whelliston always used to say, it ends with a loss. 

Except, of course, in 2020, when the pandemic forced the cancellation of the NCAA Tournament fewer than 48 hours after the nets were cut down in Washington, D.C. The Flying Dutchmen stayed champions forever, yet it represented the ultimate in desperation and heartbreak.

Tonight is absolutely about Cruz Davis and Joshua DeCady and Preston Edmead and Victory Onuetu and Biggie Patterson and German Plotnikov and Joshua Aaron Reaves and Jaeden Roberts and Silas Sunday and Alex Tsynkevich and Amir Williams and A.J. Wills and Speedy Claxton and Mike DePaoli and Tom Parrotta and Antwon Portley and Drew Metz. 

Tonight they have their chance to do what Claxton and his teammates and coaches did 26 years ago, when talent intersected with good fortune as they reached the pinnacle of their sport and ensured they’ll be remembered for as long as sports are played at Hofstra University.

But tonight is also about what a victory would hopefully represent — the chance at getting the chance (we hedge EVERYTHING after 2020 and *gestures wildly at everything*) that eluded Claxton and the 14 other men from the 2019-20 team for whom it was over before it could even begin.

Desure Buie. Tareq Coburn. Kvonn Cramer. Carl Gibson Jr. Hal Hughes. Isaac Kante. Connor Klementowicz. Eli Pemberton. Jalen Ray. Kevin Schutte. Stafford Trueheart. Colin Curtin. Mike Farrelly.

Joe Mihalich.

Tonight, the Flying Dutchmen try to dance for Hofstra’s desperate and broken-hearted forever champions.