'Nova fans swarm the Final Four
HOUSTON - Naturally, Villanova senior Mike Manta was not going to miss Saturday's NCAA semifinal game. Manta watched the whole glorious thing - in Rome.
HOUSTON - Naturally, Villanova senior Mike Manta was not going to miss Saturday's NCAA semifinal game. Manta watched the whole glorious thing - in Rome.
Standing outside NRG Stadium about four hours before Monday's NCAA title game, Manta, from Downingtown, was explaining the logistics that took him from a hotel room in the Eternal City to a shady spot outside a football stadium in Houston.
"It's all blurring together," Manta said, figuring he'd gotten maybe six hours of sleep the previous two days.
Villanova fans had shown up impressively for Saturday's dismantling of Oklahoma. As many as 1,000 or more had packed into a Sunday Mass held at Villanova's hotel.
But so many more have piled in once the Wildcats had secured a spot in their first NCAA final in 31 years.
Even in the pipes of a downtown hotel, you could hear a faint early-morning one-person chant of "Let's go Nova," coming from some random room. Downtown and outside the stadium, it didn't feel as if Villanova folks were outnumbered by their North Carolina counterparts. Both shades of blue were here in force.
Flights here from Philadelphia and Baltimore and New York area airports filled up all Sunday and Monday, to the point that by Sunday night it was basically impossible to find a flight straight into Houston that would get anyone in the building by tip-off.
"We made the call Sunday," said John Dorrian, of Stamford, Conn., 'Nova class of 2000, along with Spencer Gilason, of Baltimore. They were talking to each other and decided to do it, each landing in Houston Monday afternoon around 1:30 p.m.
Tickets weren't hard to secure. It was a soft market down here. But Dorrian had a straight path.
"I had a random connection to a Syracuse trustee," Dorrian said.
That ticket was definitely there for the taking.
Manta, the guy from who came in from Rome, had a long-planned trip to visit his girlfriend who was studying in Italy. He watched Saturday's destruction of Oklahoma on his computer. It ended around 2:30 a.m. local time. He was flying back to Philadelphia on Sunday. By 4 a.m., he had another flight booked for Houston. He left campus Monday at 3:15 a.m. for the early flight, getting here to meet his buddies, Jimmy Tuite and Chris Kotwicki, who were here all weekend. (Kotwicki, by the way, might get the award for most random Villanova jersey worn Monday night. That's right, he'd gone with one-year Wildcat Michael Bradley, 2000-01.)
These guys originally thought they'd want to stay on campus for the Final Four but had such a good time traveling to Louisville that they switched gears and decided they had to be here.
One of their friends, Paul Regan, was another late arrival. Regan had a meeting Saturday for accepted students to Penn State's medical school back home. Regan got to Houston Sunday, he said, by flying to Dallas and taking a four-hour bus ride. Seven of them shared a hotel room. Student tickets were just $40 for the whole weekend, good seats right behind the baseline.
While Manta knew he was going to be on the wrong continent Saturday, he bought the tickets anyway. "Just in case," he said.
@jensenoffcampus