SALT LAKE CITY – At 2:18 p.m. here Thursday, in the middle of the floor of the Lifetime Athletics Center on the southwest side of town, with the Snow College Badgers women’s basketball team visiting through the layup lines a few steps away, two coaches met to capture a most absurd and wonderful moment.

In the previous two hours, a Division I male hoop program from Chicago played a match against a Division I male hoop program from San Francisco. A real regular season game that counted. Set up within about 48 hours of the first text message bubbles appearing with a crazy idea behind, which ultimately took place in a Utah community college gymnasium with a bit more of 100 people seated. After all of that, Loyola Chicago‘s Drew Valentine and San Francisco’s Todd Golden shook hands once again. Valentine put his left arm around Golden. They looked at a nearby smartphone and smiled.

“I’m grateful,” Golden told Valentine, after they went their separate ways to go their separate ways. “We got what we wanted out of it. “

It wasn’t until college basketball around 2022 that someone could claim this was what everyone wanted, correctly. Well, here we are, and we are delighted to be here. A 79-74 victory for the Ramblers over the Dons was a great and entertaining game between two of the best mid-major programs in existence, but the result pales under the circumstances. It was crazy. It was glorious. It was hilarious. It was so good for the soul. This all happened, in part, because the host school’s athletic director paid another school $ 500 to put a game back one hour.

In conclusion, every game should be Loyola-San Francisco, forever.