A year ago, Mercer rocked the NCAA tournament

The LaQuinta was exquisite.

And the tone was set for a a remarkable weekend, a year ago in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Mercer 78, Duke 71 celebrates the year anniversary Friday.

Great scenarios are like wins, sort of. Hang around long enough, and you get a bunch of them.

For me, throughout the years in five states, the stories and people who will live forever in my mind tend to be on the high school level, mostly in the 1980s and 1990s in Louisiana.

And then you dip into the college world, from West Virginia sports to Shaquille O’Neal, Stanley Roberts and Chris Jackson, with enjoyable I-AA -- OK, FCS -- football in between.

You age, you have a lot of things you can talk about.

And I’m not sure that a year ago Friday still isn’t making the case for the top spot on this man’s hit parade.

It was exhausting and a boatload of work, from the preseason to the “Hey, lookie here, NCAA tournament after winning the A-Sun” with about 60,000 words in a three-week spring span highlighted by a Friday afternoon on Tobacco Road.

A year ago, the world of college basketball met Mercer, Bob Hoffman, and the Bears’ version of the Nae Nae, saw the smooth play of Langston Hall, the gutsy long pass from Bud Thomas to Anthony White Jr. and a postgame for the ages that Monty Brown doesn’t remember, thanks to a concussion.

March 21, 2014, was a day and night of intense goose bumps for thousands in Macon and Middle Georgia, many of whom had heretofore ignored Mercer but happily jumped on -- and were welcomed to -- the Bears’ bandwagon.

It remains absolutely shocking how many people filled the streets on campus and the stunning number who made the trip to Raleigh -- best driving investment they ever made, huh? -- and caught a smothering case of the fever.

Perhaps overlooked, to a point, was the little old trip to south Florida that kind of got it going, the A-Sun championship game at Florida Gulf Coast.

My press seat was flat in front of the students, not a good working situation. It would have digressed when the youngsters got a glimpse of who I was there to cover.

And imagine life in that seat had it remained occupied throughout Mercer’s exhilarating -- and again, a little forgotten and nearly as memorable -- win on the Eagles’ home court, as uninviting for guests as Mercer’s. I’m pretty sure the laptop would’ve drowned, and I’d have gotten enough Wet Willies to last a lifetime.

May God bless forever FGCU media man Jason MacBain for working -- it was a full day of stuff to do -- with me to get me to a much better work place.

The Bears’ emotions after that win might have been stronger, because the Eagles were monkeys on the Bears’ backs for a few straight years, never more so than during their own attention-getting NCAA tournament run a year earlier. It wasn’t as earth shattering, but it occupies at least as much space in that team’s collective mind as what happened almost two weeks later.

And what happened almost two weeks later is worth a high five or chest bump at some point Friday, between 12:15 p.m. and about 2:20 p.m. Certainly any bosses in the area will overlook a spastic Nae Nae breakout.

On the anniversary, Duke is preparing for another NCAA tournament game, this time against 16th seed and First Four winner Robert Morris, in Charlotte. It’s safe to say Mike Krzyzewski won’t be headed to Colonials’ locker room after the horn.

The game itself was a hodge-podge of huge plays and subtle plays, Mercer surviving on the inside despite losing Brown early to a concussion. The long pass from Thomas to White just brought you out of your seat.

And then it was over.

Honestly, it was hours later that I finally saw beginning of the Canevari-ization of America, and I was no doubt among the final interested parties to see it.

Saturday was between games, and I remember this: Nobody on this team really had an idea of what it had done, on the court and off the court, from Nae Nae to the Robot to Krzyzewski’s visit to anything.

That Saturday for one of us was spent in a hallway waiting for Hoffman and whoever else to get done with USA Today, ESPN and Sports Illustrated and then have a conversation and a laugh. The players and coaches still hadn’t quite grasped the attention from the outside world and were no different sitting in that tiny locker room in PNC Arena than if in a tiny locker room in Spartanburg.

They laughed, and, of course, they mocked and made fun of each other and consumed the attention like a linebacker at a buffet, without filling up.

Nobody knew that there was an ESPY with their names on it.

Not many people who follow sports really get it and let their views be clouded negative rather than positive. They certainly miss the point when it comes to college athletics and perhaps, in part, because their exposure is limited to plopping in front of a screen or phone.

They don’t know any of the participants, never meet them or really have any remote idea of the work involved. There’s a lot of the latter.

So when you get it and do have that extra access, trips down Memory Lane can be exquisite trips, ones that will always get you.

Mercer-Florida Gulf Coast and Mercer-Duke do that. Forget the screeching at refs, complaining about opposing teams and general sports paranoia, those two games and the aftermaths can warm a heart.

The greatness of sports is the people. Not fans, not by any stretch of the message-board imagination, but the competitors. And this was a great little deal for a small collection of teenagers and middle-agers.

By that point, I had had so many conversations, official and casual, with collection of seniors: Hall, Thomas, Daniel Coursey, Brown, Jake Gollon, White and Kevin Canevari.

The conversations with a bunch of bright, funny, sarcastic and honest folks, and chats away from the interview rooms, and you have a pretty good memory.

How the seniors moved on from campus without a fairly huge celebration or thank-you remains a mystery. But the lifetime memory will always be fresh.

Only one is still in town, Canevari, working in Mercer’s athletics department. Gollon is coaching in Wisconsin for Wisconsin-Stevens Point, which plays Friday in the Division III Final Four semifinal against Virginia Wesleyan.

Brown is married to former Mercer soccer player Emerald Phillips and is moving from Oklahoma to Florida, and Thomas is working in Denver. Hall is playing in Italy, and White last played in Australia, working to see where he’ll play next.

None are far in spirit from Hawkins and their program.

For the next few weeks in tournament promos, we’ll see Canevari dancing in the middle of his teammates and maybe another little clip from a year ago.

Like Lorenzo Charles’ putback, Christian Laettner’s shot, Florida Gulf Coast’s two wins, Lehigh over Duke, Tyus Edney’s layup, the ill-fated Chris Webber timeout, Villanova over Georgetown and Princeton over Georgetown and so many more, we know one thing:

Mercer 78, Duke 71 is forever.

Contact Michael A. Lough at 744-4626 or mlough@macon.com.

This story was originally published March 19, 2015 at 10:31 PM with the headline "A year ago, Mercer rocked the NCAA tournament ."