SATURDAy, MARCH 14 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST eZ sU D3
the coronavirus outbreak
circumstances, they let it flow,
chuckles and tears and everything
in between.
“I’ve been i n a lot of really good
meetings in my l ifetime, but I
don’t t hink I’ve ever had one
better than this,” Turgeon said.
“We cried. We l aughed. It w as an
amazing m eeting. I think it was
closure f or all of us. To b e able to
talk and laugh and cry was really
important for this team.”
But when it was over, there was
just the blank space ahead.
“I don’t k now what I’m going to
do,” Turgeon said.
He i s a basketball coach in the
best part of basketball season with
no film to watch and no
tournament to contest. He w ill
probably head down to his
vacation spot in Dewey Beach,
Del., with his family for a few days.
He w ill recruit by phone and text
because t he NCAA has dictated he
can’t i n person. He w ill... what,
exactly?
“I’m a sports nut,” Turgeon said.
“There’s going to be nothing on.
Lot of Netflix, I guess.”
He i s the head men’s b asketball
coach at t he University of
maryland, but he is all of us who
love sports. The Te rrapins were
just one team looking forward to
march in a nation full of them.
They h andled the abrupt and
unforeseen end to their season as
best they could. But like all those
college teams with all those
incomplete seasons, that doesn’t
mean they feel fulfilled.
[email protected]For more by Barry svrluga, visit
washingtonpost.com/svrluga.Penn State. They h ad no game.
They w ere still in College Park. So
at 1 1 a.m., they met.
Again, this is one team in one
set of circumstances. But think of
that journey, c ompressed over five
days: on Sunday, t he Te rrapins
beat michigan at X finity Center to
clinch a share of the regular
season Big Te n title. on monday,
some of the conversation centered
around whether the Te rps
celebrated too vociferously given
they had tied Wisconsin a nd
michigan State and, in fact, would
be the third seed in the Big Te n
tourney.
“That’s some o f what we talked
about: how God had a plan,”
Turgeon said. “There was a reason
we didn’t c linch the league
championship at rutgers [where
they lost last week]. We did it at
home, like we should have. We
talked about h ow our last time
together we cut down nets and
how great that we could end on
that note.”
When a college season ends in
normal fashion — c ome this time
of year, almost invariably with a
loss — p layers can be crushed. But
coaches have practical concerns
because t heir programs must roll
on. Turgeon would typically
address h is team briefly after, say,
a loss in the NCAA tournament,
then organize a meeting a few
days later, then give his guys a
couple of weeks off.
This, though, t his was different.
The Te rps talked for an hour. They
said goodbye to the seniors, little-
used Will Clark and Travis Valmon
and star point guard Anthony
Cowan Jr. In u nprecedentedto call a timeout or to make a
substitution. It’s a bout leading
when no one is watching.
Turgeon sent out a text to the
entire team. He t alked to a few of
his players and h is staff. T hey
agreed: L et’s meet friday. T hey
were supposed to be in
Indianapolis. They w ere supposed
to play the winner of Indiana andGovernors canceled the Division I
men’s a nd women’s b asketball
tournaments” — f elt final.
“It just hit us: It’s o ver,” Turgeon
said, “We’re like, ‘What? really?’
But we weren’t t ogether.”
In t he best sense, coaching in
college isn’t a ll about teaching
backdoor screens and defensive
footwork, about d eciding whetherseasons, that would be fulfilling,
with celebrations and champions.
Not for college sports and not
for college athletes. Careers at that
level have a finite life span
anyway. S o the tweet the NCAA
sent out after the Te rps had
dispersed at 4 :30 p.m. Thursday —
“Today, N CAA President mark
Emmert and the Board ofspecifically in College Park: The
Te rrapins arrived at X finity
Center and packed for their flight
to Indianapolis, scheduled for
later Thursday afternoon. They
dressed f or practice, scheduled for
noon.
And at 1 1:45 a.m., the Big Te n
announced the conference
tournament, which had started
the night before, was canceled.
for the Te rrapins, there would b e
no flight Thursday afternoon.
There would be no game friday
night.
There is no plan for something
like this. Not across this country.
But not in that gym in suburban
Washington, either.
“We sat down and talked,”
Turgeon said. “I s aid, ‘Guys, I hope
that they figure out a way to play
the NCAA tournament.’ And a few
guys were like: ‘I don’t k now,
Coach. I don’t s ee how.’ ”
What to do, with no game for
which to practice? The Te rps went
home, coaches to houses, players
to dorms.
There is untold t ime ahead to
fill for thousands o f athletes —
competitors for whom there’s
suddenly no competition — a nd
there will be all manner of stories
about how they filled it. But major
League Baseball players, t hey will
have a season. Who knows w hen it
will start? But it will h appen.
Pro basketball and hockey
players? The NBA said it
“suspended” i ts season. The NHL
called it a “pause.” T hey hope to
hold playoffs at s ome point. Even
delayed or after shortened
sVrlugA from D1
BARRY SVRLUGA
Turgeon, Terps dealt with disappointment the only way they knew how: Together
JonAtHAn newton/tHe wAsHIngton Post
Mark Turgeon said it was important his team was able to “talk and laugh and cry” about its season.BY CHUCK CULPEPPERone gutted senior got into the
car alone and took a two-hour
drive — into Connecticut, to his
hometown, to his parents — and
later a further one-hour drive — to
Storrs, to a friend. Another gutted
senior took a 40-minute Uber ride
home to the Bronx, saying nothing,
staring out, checking his phone.
The third gutted senior learned the
news and felt his legs go gelati-
nous, his arms just about lunging
for a chair.
The 2020 NCAA men’s basket-
ball tournament had gone dark
before it opened late Thursday af-
ternoon, the coronavirus nixing
the country’s annual binge of fri-
volity, mythology and bracketolo-
gy. And of the 13 programs that
already had snared automatic bids
for the event, one knew the deepest
ache.
Eight, after all, had just graced
the brackets in 2019, while two had
ended three-year hiatuses, one a
five-year, another nine, and then
came Hofstra of Hempstead on
Long Island. Thirty-six hours be-
fore the first cancellation of an
event held annually since 1939,
Hofstra had healed a bummer
from march 2019, had won the
Colonial Athletic Association tour-
nament held in Washington and
had aimed for the big bracket for
the first time in 19 wanting years,
epitomizing all the familiar toil
and hope and camaraderie.
“Tuesday night, it’s euphoria,”
said Joe mihalich, the team’s sev-
enth-year coach. “It’s dreams come
true. It’s climbing up the ladder.
‘A re we really climbing up the lad-
der? Yeah.’ We’re cutting these nets
down. Thirty-six hours later, you’re
stepping into a nightmare.”
He said: “I mean, we’re gutted.
We are gutted. Somebody just
ripped our guts. We are devastat-
ed.”
And he said, as did all his three
seniors in some way, “Just because
you understand something doesn’t
mean it’s e asy to accept.”
“I just feel so sorry for Long
Island; with what Long Island did
for me the past four years, I was
just so happy to give them some-
thing they were craving for
19 years,” said Eli Pemberton, a
6-foot-5 senior guard from middle-
town, Conn., who played
129 Hofstra games and
4,481 Hofstra minutes and aver-
aged 17.6 points and 5.6 rebounds
for a team that won 26 games and
lost just eight this promised-land
year.
Then he said, “I’m getting
choked up just thinking about it.”
Pemberton took his drive
through rainy roads suddenly
lighter in traffic in pandemic
times. He listened to PartyNext-
Door. Thoughts and tears took
turns, and in one thought, he em-
bodied precisely what citizens
hope for their college students. “I
remembered my first game,” he
said. “I remembered my mind-set
coming into college, how badly I
wanted to start. It was more indi-
vidual accolades as an 18-year-old.
And the growth since then.... I
wanted all the awards. I wanted all
the other things. And to see how
that changed. I don’t think for my-
self anymore. The last two years, I
put my brothers first, and the last
two years have been the best years
of my l ife.”
He got to his mother and stepfa-
ther’s place in middletown. He
heard them say, essentially, “This
isn’t the end.” He knew they don’t
and can’t quite understand fully.
The singular American experi-
ment of march madness had
grabbed his imagination in 2010,
right at the cusp of his teens, when
John Wall dazzled the tournament,
when a 33-2 Kansas lost to North-
ern Iowa in oklahoma City and a
kid saw the stands and the bands
and the verve and thought, “This is
insane.”
“I couldn’t even imagine then
what that was like, at that age,” he
said. “I may have a career beyond
this, but this experience is what
basketball players live for, the
NCAA experience.”
And he said, “A nd to get to that
point — i n the tournament.. .”
He rode on later to Storrs,
reached his friend and “just kind of
emotionally broke down, I guess.”He s lept poorly for three hours.
His teammate and fellow guard
Desure Buie had reached the
Bronx after his Hofstra-record
141 games and his 3,636 minutes
and his closing 18.2 points and
3.7 rebounds and 5.9 assists. He
talked to his older brother, Dennis.
He p layed video games online with
friends who sat in rooms else-
where. He s aid at o ne point, “I don’t
even want to really be outside.
“I’m hurt,” he said, “because I’m
a senior, I worked for this my w hole
career, I finally got over the hump
to a chance at my goal, what was
cutting down the nets one day [as
an automatic NCAA qualifier] and
now I don’t g et t he chance.”
A player who overcame a daunt-
ing knee injury at Hofstra had the
tournament’s crazy sets of promis-
es and possibilities stretched out
ahead. “I think it’s kind of, it’s hard
for people who don’t get enough
exposure and stuff like that,” Buie
said. “Look, we’re not all lottery
picks. We’re trying to create some-
thing for our families, for our-
selves. It’s hard. You don’t know
what could have been different [in
terms of gaining exposure to pro
teams], after going on a run [in the
tournament] or something like
that.”The tournament had snared
him in 2011, also on the cusp of his
teens, when fellow Bronx man
Kemba Walker shepherded a luke-
warm Connecticut team through
the kind of 11-game run — Big East
tournament, then NCAA tourna-
ment — that could spawn decades
of deluges of optimism. “That’s
what I was looking forward to try-
ing to do, just being the underdog,”
he said. He did surmise, as he
works toward a master’s degree in
higher education leadership and
policy studies, that he might recall
this bummer to help younger peo-
ple later on.
He slept poorly, for a second
straight night.
By Thursday just after 4 p.m.,
after Hofstra had shut its class-
rooms and taken its mission on-
line, senior guard Connor Klemen-
towicz helped a friend move out of
a dormitory. The two walked a
hallway. They passed a women’s
soccer player.
“I’m so sorry,” s he said.
“Sorry about what?” h e said.
Klementowicz is that vivid fea-
ture of march madness tapestry:
the bench player, always bouncing
up in support, always working
even while not often playing, al-
ways true. So he reached for thephone he had avoided all day, and
the texts had piled up. “right away,
I had to sit down,” h e said. “my legs
turned to jelly.” He sat, head in
hands.
Then he felt the natural human
wish that something true might be
untrue, so he barged over to the
office of assistant coach mike far-
relly. “He was just holding himself
up in a chair,” Klementowicz said.
“ ‘Yeah, it’s true.’ ” So they sat there
for 30 of those wordless minutes
where the wordlessness seems
right and not awkward.
The team had a meeting, which
sparked another curious wave of
human nature. “oh, I mean.... I
was like, almost like, I don’t k now, I
just, I felt like I didn’t r eally want to
see everybody, I don’t know, be-
cause I feel like the more I see my
teammates, the more upset I’d get,”
Klementowicz said. “This might be
the last time.”
He a nd teammate and chum Hal
Hughes went out later for pizza in
the ghost town. They went back to
a room and talked. Klementowicz
slept poorly, then had that fleeting
moment in the waking process
when a person thinks the bad truth
might not be true — u ntil a check of
the phone again declares other-
wise.Their one chance had gone, and
their coach, mihalich, had told
them of the pandemic, “We don’t
want to be the people who made
the problem worse; we need to be
the people who made the problem
better.” He had told them, “The last
memory as a player you’re going to
have is winning a championship.”
Then mihalich made the quick
drive home, a man with nine tour-
nament appearances for La Salle
and Niagara and the wish to see the
tournament upon the faces of his
debutantes, and he waited for his
wife, mary, to return from a trip,
and they talked all evening. They
discussed the exhilarating fruits of
this week, all lost: the speculation
about tournament destination, the
sight of the name “Hofstra” r epeat-
edly crawling across the bottom of
the TV screen as a qualifier, the
selection party.
“You counter that with what a
great year you had, how great the
kids are, how lucky you are to be
their coach,” mihalich said, soon
adding: “It was more than a team.
And that’s why we won,” and,
“They had it, man. They cared
about each other. They loved each
other. They brought the best out of
each other.”
[email protected]For Hofstra, March brought euphoria and then heartbreak
JonAtHAn newton/tHe wAsHIngton Post
After Hofstra won the CAA tournament Tuesday and a spot in the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2 001, its joy turned to pain when March Madness was canceled.