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Across from the old row houses along Montgomery Street, on the gymnasium side of Saint Peter’s College, a Jesuit priest in black is having an animated discussion with the driver of a white delivery van. Construction workers are rebuilding the parking decks, across from the auto parts and repair places. And up the street sirens are blaring on bustling Kennedy Boulevard, where a video board flashes a few basketball highlights and the all-caps message, “JERSEY CITY PROUD.”

You want grass, the emerald and manicured kind you might find on a campus that regularly produces powerhouse revenue-sports teams? Cross the Kennedy sky-bridge and you will find a few precious patches of it behind the statue of Saint Peter the Apostle, the fisherman who became the first pope. In other words, there are few testaments to the fact that in the early evening of Sunday, March 27, 2022, five Division I basketball schools out of 350 still had a chance to win the national championship, and this school was one of them.

The blue-collar Peacocks would lose their Final Four shot to the blue-blood North Carolina Tar Heels that night in Philadelphia, yet no witness will ever forget who they were and what they represented. As the 15th-seeded MAAC Tournament champ, Saint Peter’s upset second-seeded Kentucky — the elimination of John Calipari’s one-and-done NBA factory alone made the Peacocks a forever part of March Madness lore — then beat Murray State and Purdue before falling to North Carolina in the East Region final.

Saint Peter’s had an endowment of $37 million; Kentucky’s was $2.1 billion. The total Saint Peter’s budget for all athletics was $6.2 million, or $2.3 million less than the annual wage Kentucky pays Calipari, who was earning more than 31 times the salary paid to then-Peacocks coach Shaheen Holloway, the man who eliminated him.

“In terms of resources,” said Jay Young, head coach at MAAC rival Fairfield, “I think it’s the greatest upset and run in the history of American sports.”

And now the toughest act to follow in the history of mid-major basketball.

To the victor go the spoils of the transfer portal. Holloway, the sport’s newest rock star, took a better job and bigger paycheck at his alma mater, Seton Hall, where he was later joined by Saint Peter’s star KC Ndefo. A half dozen other significant Peacocks left for what they believed to be better options, including Daryl Banks III (St. Bonaventure), Doug Edert (Bryant) and twin brothers Hassan and Fousseyni Drame (LaSalle).

The program was gutted by its own mind-blowing success, and in the aftermath people are asking a simple question — now what? — with no simple answer. Though online and on-campus merchandise sales exploded during and after March Madness, along with gift-giving — donations jumped about $1.8 million from the previous year — Saint Peter’s still has the smallest endowment by far in the 11-member MAAC, more than a half-billion dollars behind conference leader Quinnipiac. Saint Peter’s still has the smallest budget in the MAAC, and still has some of the most conspicuous hurdles to overcome. “That free national publicity they got from going to the Elite Eight — you couldn’t buy that for $100 million,” said one longtime Division I head coach with New York-area ties. “Saint Peter’s deserves all the credit in the world for that, but it’s still a no-frills campus in a no-frills area in a no-frills league. That part hasn’t changed.”

So does Saint Peter’s retreat back into relative obscurity and live off the 2022 glory days for decades to come? Or can college basketball’s most improbable and embraceable underdog prove that a school with roughly 2,200 undergrads can consistently field dangerous NCAA Tournament teams?

“You always want to think we can do the unthinkable, but doing it is very different than believing you can do it,” Saint Peter’s athletic director Rachelle Paul said in an interview earlier this summer. “It still hasn’t sunk in for me. I’m still back in Atlantic City for the MAAC Tournament. That was realistic to me, winning the conference championship and maybe going in as a 15-seed and upsetting someone in the first round.

“That free national publicity they got from going to the Elite Eight — you couldn’t buy that for $100 million. … But it’s still a no-frills campus in a no-frills area in a no-frills league. That part hasn’t changed.”

“Do I think going back to the Elite Eight is a realistic expectation for our next head coach? I don’t want to say no, because we’ve proven anything is possible. The realistic expectation is to regularly compete for the MAAC championship. We can compete against programs with better resources and facilities. It’s a heavy lift, but Shaheen was able to do that in his tenure.”

A former Seton Hall star guard and assistant, Holloway was a slam-dunk pick to replace the Pirates’ former head coach, Kevin Willard, who left for Maryland. With a Big East job and an annual raise of more than $2 million on top of his $266,344 Saint Peter’s salary for the taking, Holloway had to say goodbye.

But replacing him was not such a clear-cut proposition. On one hand, after assuming the role of America’s nationally televised darling in March, Saint Peter’s was more enticing to coaches and recruits than it had ever been — the school’s website crashed after the Kentucky upset for a reason. On the other hand, what ambitious coach in his right mind would want to succeed Holloway knowing that the Peacocks would always confront competitive disadvantages and would most likely never match or surpass what they had just achieved?

Bashir Mason was the answer. As Paul started searching for a new head coach, the AD was pleasantly surprised by the level of interest in the job. Though many voices had warned Holloway against filling the Saint Peter’s opening in 2018, the doubters were quieter this time around. “My short list was blown out of the water compared to the interest I was getting,” Paul said. Her own list of candidates didn’t include sitting Division I head coaches, yet more than five expressed interest in the job.

“I was looking for someone who wanted to come in and say, ‘I want to build on that,’” she said, “as opposed to someone who thought, ‘I don’t want to touch that because I can’t live up to that pressure.’”

Mason was the perfect candidate…if only Saint Peter’s could land him. He had grown up in Jersey City and, at age 38, already had been a successful Division I head coach at Wagner, where he won three regular-season NEC titles, made two trips to the NIT and earned three conference Coach of the Year awards. He had a 111-67 overall record against NEC opponents, and represented the kind of applicant Saint Peter’s never would have attracted before it became the sport’s first 15-seed to reach the Elite Eight.

Holloway also wanted the Wagner coach to take over his program, but Mason was leaning toward rejecting the offer. He had a good team returning to the Staten Island school, a roster that might carry him to the NCAAs. The MAAC isn’t the biggest step up from the NEC to begin with. Then he had a conversation with UConn’s Dan Hurley, who had coached Mason at St. Benedict’s Prep and had hired him as an assistant at Wagner. Nobody in the Jersey City basketball community does anything without consulting one of the Hurleys, the royal family of the city’s game.

“Are you crazy?” Hurley told Mason. “That’s the next challenge for you. You go to Saint Peter’s and do exactly what you did at Wagner and put the world on notice.” 

Mason listened, and made his former boss a happy man.

“Bashir is such a strong and talented coach, and now he has a chance to go back to the community that raised him and build on what Shaheen accomplished,” Hurley said. “When Bash played for me, he always played his best against the best competition in the most important games. He’s such a tough guy with a tremendous passion and understanding for the game. He has the ability to coach the hard things on the defensive end, rebounding, and the discipline on offense to take good shots and to take care of the ball.

“When he coached with me and [brother] Bob at Wagner — and you’re in the octagon with the two of us — he could match our intensity every day. Sometimes you can see assistant coaches fading on you in practice because they can’t keep up, but that was never the case with Bash. He’s relentless.”

He’ll need to be all of that at Saint Peter’s. After replacing Hurley at Wagner in 2012, Mason said he was so consumed by the prospect of matching the Hurley standard that he “spent a lot of nights laying in a dark room overthinking things.” He’s not that besieged rookie anymore. In his first meeting with the Peacocks, Mason told the eight returning players (including three who had redshirted) that the 2021-22 season didn’t have to be a one-and-done experience.

“I was looking for someone who wanted to come in and say, ‘I want to build on that’ as opposed to someone who thought, ‘I don’t want to touch that because I can’t live up to that pressure.'”

“You still hear commentary today that Saint Peter’s made the run of a lifetime, and we won’t witness something like that again,” Mason said. “But my question to them was, ‘Why not? Why can’t we do it again?’ I think these guys are excited and now have a chip on their shoulder. You want to prove that it wasn’t a fluke. Now, can you get back that far? Who knows? But let’s go swing for it.”

Mason has done his damnedest to offset the loss of seven transfers, including virtually all of the players the country fell madly in love with. “I have no hard feelings toward the guys who left,” he said. “It’s allowed me to reshape the roster in my image and likeness.”

He brought in three impact transfers in four-year Southern University point guard Jayden Saddler, Bowling Green wing Cam Young and Coppin State shooter Kyle Cardaci. Mason’s teams played defense and rebounded well at Wagner, and he promises more of the same back home in Jersey City, where the recently renovated, 3,200-seat Run Baby Run Arena is a testament to the 1968 “Run Baby Run” Peacocks team that beat Duke in the Garden in the NIT, and a necessary upgrade on the old, creaky and leaky Yanitelli Center gym that often housed “crowds” of 500-600. During the NCAA Tournament run in March, one former unpaid assistant, Ryan Patrick Woerner, tweeted that he slept on a locker room couch two or three nights a week to avoid paying tunnel tolls back to New York and that routine flooding in the basketball offices made for “a regular workday with an inch of water on the floor.” (He posted a photo for the non-believers.)

“It was cringeworthy to see that,” Paul said, “but that was the reality of what Saint Peter’s was.”

Those grim days are over, thanks to a deep-pocketed member of that ’68 Saint Peter’s team, Tom McMahon, who gifted the school $5 million to make the facilities look more user-friendly in the lower tier of Division I. As far as NCAA Tournament revenue goes, Saint Peter’s won’t benefit dramatically more than its conference partners for winning those three games: The MAAC will hand out equal cuts of the approximately $6 million in additional revenue over six years to member schools and apply some of the cash toward improving game replay systems, buying new equipment for ESPN+ streaming productions and providing hotel stipends for the conference tourneys in Atlantic City. MAAC commissioner Rich Ensor, a 1975 Saint Peter’s graduate and former Peacocks student manager, said the conference decided to give Saint Peter’s an additional $200,000 — $50,000 for making the NCAAs and another $50,000 for each victory.

Our offices routinely flooded because we were at the top of the Yanitelli. Here's a photo of a regular workday with an inch of water on the floor. Note: the carpets/sheetrock/rotted ceiling tiles were never rehabbed after the flooding events. pic.twitter.com/DMMum49mAi

But that modest financial score doesn’t capture the full ROI in the Saint Peter’s basketball program. Ensor said that in a recent board meeting the college’s president, Eugene Cornacchia, told him that the springtime increase in donations was the biggest he’d ever seen. Applications were up nearly 60 percent over the same period last year.

“It’s been my charge since I started at Saint Peter’s to educate the folks around me that an investment in athletics, particularly in men’s basketball, can ultimately help the entire campus community,” Paul said. “They have to believe me now because it’s right there in front of them.”

Now the challenge is turning a short-term miracle into a long-term plan.

“The possibilities are endless,” Mason said. “I think what we’re going to be able to do here is compete with everybody. The challenge for me is to not let it fall. Actually, I wouldn’t call that a challenge. That’s the job in itself.”