They were picked to finish second in the conference, edged by three points in one poll and one in the other, to win the Atlantic Sun.

          And that was about right. After all, Florida Gulf Coast had become a mid-major darling, thanks in part to its ability to frustrated the bejeebers out of Mercer, even if the Bears were better.

          The season started with a three-point loss, at Texas. Then head coach Bob Hoffman won his 500th game a few days later in a romp over little Reinhardt, a game which was his 100th win at Mercer.

          The ride that we didn’t know we were on had started. The ride that we would celebrate, well, forever.

By Michael A. Lough

The Sports Report

centralgasports@gmail.com

          And the screaming and hyperventilating and dizziness that accompanies a wild and thrilling and goose-bump-filled ride followed. It took awhile, though, before the serious white-knuckle stuff started, and eventually culminated with the are-you-seriously-kidding-me? Win that we toast on this day, 10 years later.

          Few people outside of the program or athletic department saw as much Mercer basketball that year as the lone Mercer beat writer, yours truly. Such duties include having to sit through games against Reinhardt and Johnson & Wales, among others, and, when a team is good, some boring games against decent teams, like by 37 over Kennesaw State.

The quality basketball - just pure, solid, real basketball - and those playing and coaching it made the boring games more tolerable.

          Sure didn’t see what was coming, but that’s fine.

The years of coverage from this seat have included Super Bowls, Final Fours and national championships, a World Series or two, bowl games, the College World Series, and so on, but man, covering that team and those players and that staff is still pretty much the most enjoyable professional experience of my career. What makes them a brotherhood makes them a group that could show up at Mercer on the 15th or 20th anniversary of The Win, and those who knew them in 2013-14 would feel like they’d hardly been apart.

          As the greedmongers slowly, by a thousand cuts, devastate college sports, it’s hard to imagine many college basketball teams keeping so many players together so long to achieve greatness.

          The year started off OK. There was a win over Seton Hall, and hammering of former mid-major darling Valparaiso, and another good effort in a loss at Oklahoma. Then came a win over Mississippi, with conference play soon to come.

          Yeah, the Bears started conference play 1-1, losing by six at North Florida. Five wins followed before a visit from FGCU, which was, yessir, a four-letter word starting with F for Mercer.

          Mercer won 69-55, sparked by Daniel Coursey’s 14/12 double-double. The winning streak ended with a stunning 80-61 loss at USC Upstate. Goodness, how that would be avenged. Speaking of which, FGCU did some of that with a 75-61 win at home in late February, the Bears following a week later with a home loss to North Florida, for the sweep.

          Huh?

          The regular season ended with a win over Jacksonville, the teams opening the conference tournament against each other. No suspense, a 21-point Mercer win.

          Then came – and the goose bumps pop up at the memory – USC Upstate.

          Oh dear Lord. I wish I had the memory of so many coaches and players, but I don’t. This one, though, this one still lingers, because it was, well, a heavyweight boxing match in a video game on steroids. It was an event, a monstrosity of a basketball game that, frankly, if you were there, you really didn’t want to end.

          Two overtimes? Hell, let’s play till breakfast that next morning. It was just that glorious a basketball extravaganza.

          Pow! The Spartans get back up before the count. Oof! The Bears get back up before the count.

          It was tied 10 times, and there were six lead changes, and nobody led by more than eight points, and that lasted for barely a half minute before it was a one-possession game. Again.

          Langston Hall put up a third of his 21 points in the second overtime of the 78-75 tournament semifinal win.

          There wasn’t a soul in Hawkins Arena who didn’t curse their alarm clock the next day, so exhausted were they from what they saw. Imagine the players. Hall played 45 minutes, Bud Thomas 42. Nine Bears scored and nine got rebounds and Mercer needed every blessed one of ‘em.

          Most think about the two games that came next, but the Bears will tell you. That Upstate game, eh, epic doesn’t quite do it justice.

          Put that into the blender, and it just makes Mercer’s 68-60 win three days later at Alico Arena for the tournament championship that much more impressive. The Eagles had knocked out the Bears the previous two seasons, and one could see a tired Mercer group showing up.

          One would see wrong. Big.

          Mercer led 33-17 at halftime, and the margin grew to 19 before FGCU crept back to within one with just less than nine minutes left. You could hear the balloon losing air, and the FGCU monkey climbing happily returning to Mercer’s back. The margin was three with 2:29 left, but a Hall jumper started easing the door shut. Coursey’s dunk with 26 seconds left slammed it shut.

          In truth, had Mercer’s season ended on the following Friday in Raleigh, the 2013-14 season still would have gone down as a forever memory, considering just getting past the FGCU hump after the unforgettable Upstate win.

          But it didn’t, and a chunk of Macon and Central Georgia came together for the team of a school not many had much to do with, for a variety of reasons. It was a bonding experience we sure could use again, in any form or fashion.

          Unfortunately, those in charge of the digital efforts at the ol’ paper were apparently on sabbatical off and on for a few years during assorted tech transitions, and thousands of stories done by the then-superb Telegraph staff in all areas are lost forever.

          Takes effort to eliminate that much copy from the world wide web, but, yup.

          In this case, most of about 60,000 words cranked out during that dramatic January, February and March by these still-juiced fingers don’t exist, except in some cases when content was used by other papers.

          They do exist, though, for those who read them back then during a run of exquisite basketball that led up to Central Georgia sports history. There’s plenty of that, but it’s sort of limited to being historical just around these parts.

          Mercer over Duke? The world saw, with a big, dropped jaw. And while the stories are gone in this ether world of technology, there are no doubt scores of scrapbooks loaded with the stories of those three months.

          And it was more than just beating Duke.

          Life after that was as inexplicable as beating Duke. Mercer went 19-16 a year later, the athletics department moving from the Atlantic Sun to Southern Conference. There was some muddling going on, the Bears unable to manage any notable non-conference wins, though they still got a postseason trip to the College Basketball Invitational, falling by two to Louisiana-Monroe.

          The mountain Mercer was on after beating Duke crumbled midway through the next season when Jibri Bryan was killed near campus in a drug deal, the day after an 85-70 win over Samford that put Mercer at 17-6.

          The slide downhill was strong. Mercer won its next game, but ended up losing seven straight en route to a 19-15 finish. There were suspensions, unofficially related to the Bryan tragedy, and the program started veering off the tracks, from the top down.

          A 15-17 season followed, then 19-15. But the ship hadn’t been righted, and Bob Hoffman – among the most enjoyable coaches I’ve ever dealt with on any level - was fired after an 11-17 season in 2018-19, a season that included 12 regular-season losses by single digits. There was just a fog still over the program, in many phases, one that hasn’t quite cleared as Mercer prepares for the successor of Hoffman’s successor.

          There remains a faction that still doesn’t understand Hoffman’s dismissal, but goodness, it’s complicated, more than just the full mess surrounding Bryan’s death.

Alas, Hoffman regained his innate Hoffmanness at Central Oklahoma – word was he wanted one more year at Mercer before he and wife Kelli would return to Oklahoma to care for their elderly parents – and won his 600th men’s game in December. The Division II Bronchos went 20-11 this season, giving him an 94-53 record there in five seasons.

As for that group, an attempt to corral their thoughts by email didn’t completely work out as hoped for, with seven replies, but that’s life. Literally. Dang, it’s been 10 years, and while they still are fresh-faced and energetic and young in your head, shoot, they’re pretty much past 30 and having kids and groaning after playing, or playing vicariously through teammates still on a roster, albeit a foreign one.

Read their replies to questions elsewhere here, and the familiarity comes back.

Here’s hoping that there is the vision – and maybe some fund-raising – to bring every 2013-14 Bear possible back to campus on the 20th anniversary. It’ll be like they hardly left.

The memories sure haven’t.