Well, the Keydet Basketball team has this great write-up in SI this week.
But it was the intro that grabbed me.
TO APPRECIATE the small miracle of Virginia Military Institute basketball, you must go to the Hill at dawn. You must wait under a purple winter sky, with a hard frost beneath your feet and dense fog lying low across the surrounding Shenandoah Valley. Then you must train your eyes on the olive-drab stone walls of the four-story gothic barracks rising from the west end of the parade grounds, for this is where every long day begins.
At three minutes before seven last Thursday morning the nearly 1,400 corpsmen and women of VMI emerged from portals in the barracks walls and formed into precise rows that stretched more than 100 yards across the front of the building. A lone bugler sounded reveille and the flags of the U.S. and Virginia were hoisted skyward. A steady drumbeat began, and the cadets, dressed in identical gray uniform slacks with black jackets, marched to the end of the barracks, turned sharply left and downhill toward the mess hall, into the rising sun.
Took me back twenty years…woolies and waking up at third call, hoping and praying the bugler was going to play last call SLOOOOOOOOW.
Go Keydets!
“Three minutes before seven…”
Now that’s accuracy!!
To wit, I made a point never to pass through the arch until 30 second call.
Did they move VMI into the Valley?? That is, out of the James River basin where it used to be into a completely different watershed?
And “corpsmen”?? Docs??
FOOL OF A REPORTER.
Other than that, good press.
But yes, that does evoke memories.
I’ve prided myself on mastering the science getting ready in just enough time that I casually fall into my spot right as the last note sounds.