Northern Kentucky Sports Chronicle

(This column was originally published on Dec. 23, 2019) Christmas Eve is always my favorite day of the year. For many reasons. For several decades. From trying to figure out how Santa Claus and his reindeer would land on the rooftop, to driving around the area looking at the various holiday displays. Sneaking down the steps to see my parents putting gifts underneath the tree. Spending time with family and friends. Christmas Eve is a special time, then and now. My all-time favorite college basketball memory also occurred on a Christmas Eve. Of course, it depends on if you go by the Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone or Eastern Time, because that moment occurred around 2 a.m. (EST) on Dec. 24, 1982. That’s the night Chaminade stunned the college basketball world by defeating top-ranked Virginia in Honolulu. Technically, the game tipped off on Dec. 23, 1982, in Hawaii. But by the time Chaminade — then an NAIA program — had pulled off the gargantuan upset of previously unbeaten Virginia and All-Ame...

L ooking back at it, the night of Nov. 8, 2008, emphatically revealed the impressive growth of Northern Kentucky University and the impact of intercollegiate athletics. The roads in Highland Heights were jammed with vehicles headed to The Bank of Kentucky Center. Unless you were on the pass list, parking on campus was a nightmare after 5 p.m. Why? Folks from all over the region were gathering to see NKU play host to the University of Louisville in the first-ever college basketball event in the new facility. Yes, the same basketball program that began its existence without a home floor in 1971 was welcoming legendary head coach Rick Pitino and the Louisville Cardinals to open NKU’s new 9,400-seat arena. Who could’ve imagined this in 1971, when then-Northern Kentucky State College met Calvary College inside Newport High School’s small gym in the Norsemen’s debut as a basketball program? But it really happened. A raucous crowd of 8,408 — most of them wearing the black and gold of NKU — s...