By Kevin Armstrong
PHILADELPHIA — All the makings of a hangover are here in Lot D6 outside Wells Fargo Center on the last Sunday of January. It is 11 a.m.; the temperature is 35 degrees. Four gates to the parking area have already been open three hours by now, and Villanova flags fly as handles of Vladimir vodka are hoisted up. “Thunderstruck” blasts out of speakers in the back of a pickup truck rented for $19.95 at U-Haul. Natural Light flows through a funnel; co-eds mix mimosas. Tipoff for the top-ranked Wildcats’ game against No. 12 Virginia nears while frat brothers and sorority sisters, brought to the site via 24 yellow buses and a caravan of Ubers, tap Busch Light kegs and tipple. Sophomore William Bantner and senior Thomas Brew toss a football across 12 spaces. Brew, in a vest and Aviators, lifts a bottle of André champagne.
“Drinking it pretty much every game,” he says. “Great year to be a Wildcat!”
Brew is not alone in his champagne taste. It is the drink of choice for Main Liners as they revel on, at least 22 students swigging from green champagne bottles throughout the party zone. Corks litter the lot; cigar smoke swirls above a crowd dressed in championship swag. Down the block, the team makes its way through the bar at XFinity Live!, into the locker room and on court for warmups. It is known as the Wildcat Walk; forecasts suggest cauldron conditions coming as white T-shirts emblazoned “We Are One” cover 3,000 seats. The largest crowd for a college game ever held in Philadelphia is expected. University officials point out that all 20,907 tickets have been gone for a month. Jason Donnelly, a former assistant coach now operating on the business development side, notes, “Every seat, every suite, sold.”
They all bear witness to a buzz kill courtesy of the visiting Cavaliers early on. There is a first-to-50points-wins feel as Josh Hart, a national player of the year candidate, misses his first six shot attempts. Fellow senior Kris Jenkins, a heavyset marksman who knocked down the buzzer-beater in last April’s NCAA national championship win over North Carolina, goes 0-for-thefirst half. The Wildcats are getting caught on screens and can’t quite figure Virginia’s bone-thin freshman Ty Jerome, who buries a pair of 3-pointers several steps beyond the NBA arc. From the home sideline, Villanova coach Jay Wright, dressed in one of his WinnerWithin wardrobes accented with always-beclosing accoutrements, grows incensed when Hart is whistled for a foul call. Wright is at first held back by two assistant coaches, but he shakes them off, marching determinedly on court in a timeout. He fumes.
“No f---ing way!” Wright says, holding up two fingers toward the referees. “That’s two! Two f--ing calls!”
There is a Fathead of Pope Francis, His Eminence’s mouth agape, being waved by a student fan on the baseline in front of Wright. In the coach’s wake are two upset defeats that inspired court storms at opposing arenas in recent weeks. First, it was Butler; then it was Marquette. Wright needed to be restrained by