A Team Worth Celebrating

"Sports is human life in microcosm."
—Howard Cosell

As anyone who has ever been foolish enough to fall in love with a team knows, there is a fundamental truth about sports that, sometimes, non-sports fans simply can’t quite understand.

That truth is this: While it may be true to say sports are simply about sports, it’s also true that sports are about so much more than just sports.

At their best, sports can—and, yes, I really believe this–be about nothing less than life itself. Sports can be about community and togetherness. They can be about sacrifice and resilience. They can be about tremendous triumph or crushing defeat. They can break our hearts, and they often do, but they are also unique in their ability to deliver almost impossible thrills—not to mention moments, memories and lessons that can last a lifetime.

In this issue of the Lehigh Bulletin, we’ll offer only further proof of that.

Five years ago, a scrappy, confident group of Lehigh Mountain Hawks stunned the college basketball world by knocking off the mighty Duke Blue Devils in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, more commonly known as “March Madness.” The thrilling 75-70 triumph was not the first upset in the grand history of that legendary tournament, and it won’t be the last. But here at Lehigh, that game immediately became, and still remains, one of the greatest moments in the history of not only Lehigh Athletics, but of Lehigh University.

And yes, I assure you, the reasons go far beyond basketball itself.

In our cover story for this special issue of the Bulletin, Mary Ellen Alu and I tell the story not just of that Lehigh team’s amazing win over the Blue Devils, but also the focused journey those players and coaches undertook, together, to achieve the unthinkable. Their success, as you’ll read, was no accident; it came about precisely because of a shared commitment to be great—a commitment that was as much a pledge to each other as it was to themselves. Indeed, talk to those players today and they’ll tell you, almost to a man, that never were they on a team that cared for each other, and supported each other, as much as the 2011-2012 Mountain Hawks.

It was a pleasure working on this story, and I sincerely hope that you, our readers, will enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed putting it together. Thank you, as always, for reading.

And from us to you, we proudly proclaim: Go Lehigh!

Sincerely,
Tim Hyland, Editor

Share your thoughts—your kudos, your criticisms, your questions—by sending your Letters to the Editor. They can be sent via snail mail to Tim Hyland, 401 Broadway, Bethlehem, Pa., 18105 or via email to tih313@lehigh.edu