March Madness: Hofstra's 2019-20 team would like you to remember that it made the NCAA Tournament

Hofstra, people keep saying, has made the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 25 years.

“That’s definitely not true,” Desure Buie wants you to know. “So not true.”

He’s certain of it. That's because he was there, a senior guard from the Bronx, on the actual most recent Hofstra team to make it to the tournament.

That was the 2019-20 Pride, who won the school’s first CAA championship since joining the conference in 2001-02, cut down the nets in celebration, nearly were diverted to a quarantine on the bus ride home from Washington the following day —  and then, on March 12, 2020, received word that their season was over because COVID-19 had canceled the NCAA Tournament.

Buie was one of three seniors on that team along with Eli Pemberton and Connor Klementowicz whose college careers ended that way. It also turned out that head coach Joe Mihalich would never hold that title again. A few months later, just when the team was about to reassemble on a newly opened campus in August, he suffered a life-threatening hemorrhagic stroke. He survived but left his post with Hofstra, at first temporarily and then permanently.

Mihalich currently is a special assistant to coach Darris Nichols at his alma mater, LaSalle University in Philadelphia.

“It was a strange time,” Mihalich told Newsday of that week, which began with promise and ended with a pandemic, fighting back tears at times during the phone interview. “I’m still not over it.”

So while it is a fact that Hofstra has not played in an NCAA Tournament game in a quarter-century, saying the Pride never made it there during that span is just another injustice toward that unlucky crew.

There certainly were many people who suffered far worse fates because of that virus — losing lives, loved ones, careers, businesses — but in terms of basketball, it’s hard to find a group that lost out on more than that Hofstra team.

There even was legitimate hope that the Pride could win their first-round game. They won 12 of their last 13, and they beat UCLA in Los Angeles and won at No. 19 Richmond that season. Their 26 victories tied for the second most in school history. If they had added one more in the tournament, they would have been tied for the top spot.

But they never even found out how they would have been seeded or whom they would have faced.

Even the banners that hang in the school’s arena don’t seem to know what to do with them. They are listed among the conference champions, but not among the NCAA Tournament participants.

“My team was definitely a tournament team,” Buie said.

Not that he is bitter. Not any longer, at least. He said he has “outgrown” those emotions.

Now 30, he is still playing professionally for Dinamo Sassari of Lega Basket Serie A (LSA) in Sardinia, Italy. He’s also played in Lithuania, the Netherlands, Germany, Turkey and the G League here in the United States since his four seasons at Hofstra.

The one place he never played, though, was the one he grew up dreaming about: the NCAA Tournament.

“I feel like it worked out the way it was supposed to,” he said. “I have a different perspective on it now. Yeah, I wish I could have played in the tournament, but then again, who knows what would have happened? I’m just thankful I’m still able to play basketball and still represent Hofstra. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t have that lens. I had a great time at the conference tournament. So there is no bad for me.”

Others on that skunked squad try to feel the same way. Mihalich said he copes by remembering the rule he set for every team he led during his 22-year career as a head coach. Each practice he ever ran could not end until the final shot went through the basket. End on a make, he always said.

Hofstra won that 2020 CAA final against Northeastern, 70-61. The Pride scored on 12 of their last 13 possessions and put up 26 points in the final 7 1/2 minutes of play.  Buie hit two free throws with 18 seconds left to ice the game.

Those were the last two shots of the season.

“We ended on a make,” Mihalich said proudly.

With this year’s Hofstra team scheduled to face Alabama in the first round in Tampa on Friday, though, those tucked-away feelings are coming out of hibernation as others get to live out what they earned but never actually experienced.

Even Speedy Claxton, the head coach of this season's team, has referenced those scars on a few occasions. He was an assistant coach in 2020, and when Hofstra beat Monmouth to win the CAA Tournament last week, one of his first remarks was in regard to what befell him six years earlier.

“Nothing better stop us this year,” Claxton said on March 10. “It was great winning it that year, but we didn’t actually get to compete in the tournament. I’m hoping that everything goes according to plan, that we can go through Selection Sunday, see who we’re playing, and we actually get to fully experience the tournament and everything that it has to offer.”

Hofstra wasn’t the only team denied its One Shining Moment in 2020; it was one of 12 schools that were able to complete their conference tournaments before the world battened its doors. With Hofstra and North Dakota State making it this year, only four of those done-dirty dozen have yet to make it back to the automatic qualifier: Bradley, Belmont, Boston University and East Tennessee State.

“I try not to think about it or talk about it because it crushed us,” Claxton told Newsday. “For us to play in the finals and get over that hurdle and win it and cut down the nets and then the next day they were like, ‘Sorry, season’s over,’ it was like, whoa. That was a special team. I recruited a lot of those players. Buie, he had a great year and he was about to experience the tournament. Every college player should get to experience that.”

Mihalich recalled the first person he told about the tournament’s cancellation: Klementowicz, the senior walk-on. The campus was on a previously scheduled semester break at the time, so he was the only one who got the news face-to-face. Six years later, Mihalich fought back tears remembering the ones those two shed together that day.

Said Mary Mihalich, Joe’s wife: “I wish all those kids [on the 2020 team] could get on the plane with them this year. I wish they could go with them. They didn’t get to go. It was a life experience they didn’t get to have.”

The Mihalichs still have all the souvenirs from that conference tournament: the hats, the T-shirts, the net. They even have a framed copy of the Newsday back page trumpeting their victory hanging in their den. And yes, they have been watching this Hofstra run.

Joe Mihalich said that while there still is pain each March from what happened to his last team, it is counterbalanced this year by his joy for the program and its head coach.

“I am so, so happy for Speedy,” he said.

Shortly after he and his wife watched Hofstra win its tournament on March 10 on television — with the announcers repeatedly and erroneously referencing it as the first such victory since 2000 — Mihalich’s phone rang.

It was his old boss, Hofstra athletic director Rick Cole Jr., dialing in from the arena while the team was still celebrating.

“He just called to say he was thinking about me,” Mihalich said.

He was very touched by the gesture.

It was nice to know not everyone has forgotten.

Buie said he is rooting for this season's team even if he can’t follow it as closely as he would like. Because of the time difference in Italy, he usually is asleep when the Pride play.

“The next day I wake up and look at the stats,” he said.

If Hofstra can figure out a way to win, Buie said he might start to get up early to watch the games in the later rounds live.

Until they get on the actual floor and tip off against Alabama at about 3:15 p.m. on Friday, though, Buie and the rest of those 2020 players probably will be holding their breath a bit.

“By the grace of God,'' Buie said, "they’ll be all right.''

He said he just hopes they get what they deserve. That’s something he and his team never got . . .  and too often still do not.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.