Jim Mashek

It’s a Jesuit school, located in Jersey City, New Jersey, that until nine days ago had never won an NCAA Tournament men’s basketball game.

Now they’re the sports phenomenon of the year.

And they’re not done yet.

The Saint Peter’s University Peacocks, representing the Little Guy just about everywhere, are in the Elite Eight, and on Sunday, they’ll play for a berth in the Final Four.

It’s an unbelievable story.

Saint Peter’s has a modest $37 million endowment and roughly 2,100 undergraduate students. Their nickname, the Peacocks, is equal parts interesting and not-so-intimidating. I was eating dinner while covering the KHSAA Sweet Sixteen boys tournament in Lexington when Saint Peter’s, the No. 15 seed, was knocking off the second-seeded Kentucky Wildcats in first-round tournament play.

Suffice it to say the bar crowd at Cattleman’s Roadhouse in Georgetown, Kentucky, were not a happy bunch of campers that night.

Three days later, leaving town after Warren Central High School’s impressive run to the Sweet Sixteen championship game, they were still grumbling about the Wildcats’ moment of infamy.

Even though Saint Peter’s ended Murray State’s impressive 21-game winning streak a couple days later, taking a 70-60 to become the underdog story of the NCAA Tournament.

The Peacocks evidently weren’t satisfied.

They made the short trip to Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center and eliminated Purdue University, slipping past the Boilermakers 67-64 to reach the Elite Eight and Sunday’s appointment TV game with tradition-rich North Carolina.

Their understated but intelligent coach, Shaheen Holloway, will be likely poached by a larger school, with a much bigger athletics budget, than Saint Peter’s. Holloway played basketball at Seton Hall, though, so New Jersey is definitely in his blood.

They’ve produced a folk hero in shooting guard Doug Edert, who has already accepted a NIL (name, image, likeness) deal that will put some pretty serious money in his pocket down the road.

Edert apparently irked Holloway by jumping on the press row table after the Peacocks put Purdue on ice in Philadelphia.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Edert said, according to the transcript during the press conference afterward. “I found a little opening and people started moving stuff, so I don’t know. I was so excited.”

I covered an NCAA Tournament game when a triumphant player jumped on the press table about five feet from where I was sitting in the immediate aftermath of the verdict.

In 2003, a favored Mississippi State team that I was covering squared off against Brandon Miller and the Butler Bulldogs in Birmingham, Alabama. State had no business losing that game, but of course Butler was able to slow the tempo before Miller’s floater in the lane, with about six seconds to play, lifted the underdogs from Indianapolis to an improbable 47-46 victory.

Miller hit the tough shot, made eye contact with the Butler section in the stands at the Birmingham-Jefferson County Civic Center, and leaped onto the table, sticking the landing, about five or six feet from my laptop.

Yikes.

(That was the night me and a few of my homeboys, including Gregg Ellis, then with the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, and his photographer, Thomas Wells, got to meet the hilarious Charles Barkley in an after-hours bar in the Five Points area. Trust me, he’s just as funny in person as he is on TV.)

Eight years later, Butler took Duke to the limit before dropping a 61-59 decision in the NCAA Tournament championship game.

There have been other interlopers.

Loyola of Chicago, representing the Missouri Valley Conference, reached the Final Four in 2018. Florida Gulf Coast had its magical run to the Sweet Sixteen eight or nine years ago. George Mason got to the Final Four in 2006. (One of my nieces graduated from George Mason a few years ago.)

In 1971, Western Kentucky University drubbed the mighty Kentucky Wildcats 107-83, in Athens, Georgia, on its way to the only Final Four appearance in school history. (And three years and change later, I enrolled at WKU my own self.)

In 2018, the University of Maryland-Baltimore Country Retrievers, as a No. 16 seed, whipped the University of Virginia 76-54 in first-round play. It was the first time a No. 16 seed had defeated a top-seeded squad in tournament history.

The Peacocks are turning heads and making history, with every game they play.

It’s fitting they’ll get a shot at Final Four glory against North Carolina, which has been college basketball 🏀 royalty for decades.

Here’s hoping they do it.

Sports scribblers always root for the best story.