Jaren Holmes is second on the team in scoring at 13.4 points per game. P-J file photo

Let’s start with the tough part first. Let’s start with Friday afternoon, March 11. Where were you? Were you on F Street NW in downtown Washington, inside Capital One Arena, your voicebox already shredded from the relentless 39 minutes, 58.9 seconds that had preceded this moment, playing hooky from your job, your family, your life? Were you at a neighborhood saloon somewhere, having knocked off work early, pestering the barkeep to find USA Network on one of the overhead TVs? Were you stuck in the office, nervously checking your phone for updates, praying to see one final switch from the proper side of the hyphen?

We know where Kyle Lofton was. He was at the foul line, with 1.1 seconds to go in the Atlantic 10 quarterfinals. The Bonnies trailed Saint Louis, 57-56, but Lofton had been fouled during a mad, blurry, last-second rush. Two shots. Make one, clinch overtime. Make two, and the Bonnies would almost certainly clinch a spot for themselves in the semifinals the next day, where they’d take their puncher’s chance against Davidson and keep alive a dream of a second straight NCAA Tournament. It was, as a fan, an excruciating instant, and so you can imagine what it had to have been like to actually be on the floor. Or on the foul line.

And … well, you know what happened next.

And you remember because sports does that to us. It can genuinely take you on some of the most natural highs you’ll ever experience, even as a spectator. And it can absolutely send you plummeting into some of the greatest chasms of despair imaginable. If you care, if you’re invested, if you’re all in, there is no such thing as simply brushing off either the ecstasy or the agony. This was agony. This was heartbreak. This was heartache.

For us as fans, yes, sure. It hurt. Man. It hurt like hell.

But for Kyle Lofton? Here’s a kid who was voted team captain before he’d ever played a minute at St. Bonaventure. Remember this: it was Lofton who was the first player to believe that what the Bonnies had done from 2016-18 wasn’t a fluke, who wanted to build on what that group had done. He was the first piece of what became the greatest class in school history to say: I want in. And he was equal to the hype. All-Rookie team as a freshman. First-team all-league as a sophomore and a junior, third-team as a senior despite playing with an ankle that wasn’t quite right most of the year. Almost 1,600 career points. Almost 600 assists. The heart, soul and face of the program for 112 games. And, not least, an 82% free throw shooter.

Yes. What happened to Lofton wasn’t just heartbreaking.

This was cruel.

And this is why, exactly 11 days later, exactly 116 miles to the south and to the west of that foul stripe at Capital One Arena, as Lofton found himself in virtually the same exact spot — down one, late, two shots to tie, to win, or to lose — he might have noticed that he wasn’t standing there alone this time. There were maybe 500 or 600 Bona fans among the 6,829 inside John Paul Jones Arena. And there were thousands more who were watching on ESPN, or listening on the radio back home on WPIG, or on the internet. But all of them — every one of them, every one of us, every citizen of what we know as Bona Nation — was standing beside him on the line, and behind him, surrounding him. You couldn’t necessarily see us. But we were there.

A few days before, an old Bonnies basketball hero named Paul Hoffman had recalled his own moment of foul-line infamy, at the end of overtime of the 1971 NIT semifinals. The Bonnies were tied with Georgia Tech in that one, 67-67, and as the final buzzer sounded Hoffman was fouled. Two shots. Either one would’ve won the game, and earned the Bonnies a trip to the NIT final against North Carolina. He missed them both. The Bonnies lost in the second OT. So he, more than anyone alive, knew precisely Lofton’s unique agony at the end of the Saint Louis game. He told Erik Brady of the Buffalo News: “I would tell [Kyle] I know exactly how you feel. And I would tell him not to let it get him down. Kyle has had a great career at Bona. And I worry that people will remember those missed free throws.”

Yes. You’d better believe Paul Hoffman was standing on that foul line at John Paul Jones Arena, too, right next to Lofton, three days shy of 51 years later, 5.3 seconds left, Bonnies trailing Virginia, 51-50.

And then a most remarkable thing happened.

He made the first one.

And he made the second one.

Bob Murphy, who broadcast New York Mets games for 50 years, always said of baseball: “It is a game of redeeming features.” And, son of a gun, as it turns out, so is basketball. Kyle Lofton is the proof. He’s the evidence. He’s the testimony.

“After the A-10 loss, I didn’t want to talk to anybody,” Lofton would say seconds later, after Osun Osunniyi’s block had secured a 52-51 win, a spot in the NIT semifinals, and a permanent place in the program’s eternal Pantheon for this forever basketball team. “I was in my bed crying for a week.”

We knew, and we know. The players might play these games, after all.

It’s the rest of us who live them.

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And now, there is this final chapter in what has been one of the truly remarkable seasons in St. Bonaventure’s 102-year basketball history. There is this trip to New York City this week for the NIT’s semifinals, maybe the last time this 84-year-old tournament will be played at Madison Square Garden. The Bonnies, of course, have a long and deep association with the NIT going back to 1951, when Eddie Melvin’s first great team stunned Cincinnati in double-overtime before falling to St. John’s in a heartbreaker, 60-58. They finished third in that ’71 NIT, beating Duke in the consolation round. They won it all in 1977, and that team is still treated with a reverence on campus, and in town, that will last for as long as St. Bonaventure basketball does.

If this is it for the Garden and the NIT, then the Garden is in for a treat this week because the Bonnies will be there. There will be eight buses of students there, because it took alumni about a New York minute to surpass the initial ask of $25,000 — a total that approached $50,000 in less than 48 hours — to help get them all there. Tuesday might as well be declared a holiday for Bonnies fans because anyone who can will be begging off work, with the more fortunate ones setting their GPS for the Garden.

It is exactly the kind of send-off the NIT should get.

And exactly the kind of epilogue this Bonaventure season deserves.

There has honestly never been a season quite like it, a dizzying dance through the thesaurus to collect the proper number of adjectives. There were so many astonishing highs — a place in the Associated Press rankings for the first time since 1971, reaching as high as No. 16 in the poll of Nov. 22; the glorious sweep through the Charleston Classic; an 8-1 romp through late February and early March in which they began to get their mojo back. And there were some bone-crushing lows: Lofton’s ankle sprain late in the Coppin State game that cost him four games and affected him for weeks after; the gut-punch back-to-back losses to Connecticut and Virginia Tech that cratered the team’s critical NET ranking into triple-digit range for a while and all but eliminated the possibility of an at-large bid to the NCAAs; and, of course, the final 1.1 seconds against Saint Louis.

Bacchanalia and buzzkill in equal measure.

And then, wouldn’t you know it, the NIT called.

And look, we can be honest here: Nobody truly wants to play in the NIT. It’s a consolation prize. Years ago, the NCAA did away with consolation games at regional sites and the Final Four; the NIT, in essence, is a 32-team, 31-game consolation. Every team in the NIT wants to be somewhere else: either in the NCAA or at spring break. Facts are facts. But there is also the one carrot. There is New York. There is the Garden. In the hours after the post-Saint Louis devastation, that’s what Mark Schmidt sold to his players: Let’s try to get to the Garden. Let’s try to get to the Mecca. It’ll be an experience you’ll never forget.

Funny thing. Back in the day, the NIT was the tournament of choice. The NCAA was a closed-door tournament with only eight or 12 teams, mostly affiliated with conferences. In the ’50s, the Northeast was a glorious buffet of independents. Before World War II, St. Bonaventure was a football school first, and basketball was an afterthought, the season mostly comprised of Little Three home-and-homes with Niagara and Canisius and a smattering of games against smaller schools. After the war, it became clear big-time football would never be viable and the university made a choice — it decided to become a basketball school. It hired a big-time coach, the fiery Eddie Melvin, who’d been a star at Duquesne and had played professionally. It beefed up the schedule, became a regular participant in doubleheaders at the Buffalo Auditorium.

By 1951, the Bonnies were 18-5. The NIT called. They went back again the next year and finished in third place. By the end of the ’50s, under Eddie Donovan, they were an annual participant. The NIT, in so many ways, helped establish St. Bonaventure as a legitimate Division I program.

And all these years later, in 2022, it would provide a proper denouement.

Not that it seemed especially interested in making that happen, of course.

We can waste a lot of time here arguing about the way the NIT treated the Bonnies, the draw they were given the absurd travel schedule that was thrust upon them, the quick turnarounds and, sure, the fact that it sure seemed like St. Bonaventure was the higher seed in the original bracket than Virginia (even though only the top 16 teams were officially seeded) since in every bracket ever drawn up since the start of history the team that draws the 4 seed in an eight-line event is considered the 5 seed, and the team that’s gets the 3 seed is a 6. So, yes: you can argue forever into the echo chamber that the Virginia game last Tuesday should’ve been in the Reilly Center, and you’re right, and no matter how loud you shout about it the NCAA will curl its ears back at you, deaf to your complaints.

Here’s the great thing about all of that, though.

The alumni howled. Students complained. Season-ticket-holders wailed.

You know who was unbothered by all of it?

The players. And we should have known that this was set up perfectly for this group, for this bunch, these five seniors who have played so many games together, so many minutes, who’ve won so many remarkable games and shared some of the most grief-stricken locker rooms, too. (Never forget: in addition to absorbing some difficult defeats along the way they were asked to play a basketball game last year mere hours after Dr. Dennis DePerro, the university’s president and a huge benefactor of the basketball team, died of COVID, an awful day that actually helped begin the campus’ healing process.)

They let the rest of us litigate the unfairness of it all.

And took care of their own business.

¯ You seeded us 5, which was ridiculously low? Gotcha.

¯ Going to send us two time zones away? Check.

¯ At altitude, no less? Bring it.

¯ You’re going to break NCAA protocol and give Oklahoma a home game even though they’re hosting a women’s regional? No problem.

¯ Going to give Virginia the home game? No sweat.

¯ And make us play on one day’s rest? Tell us where and when.

They just played.

Man. How they played.

And at the end of the Virginia game with a win probability hovering at 2% and the season in the balance and their careers nearly done, they did what they’ve done for as long as they’ve been together. They came back — and all five had a hand in it. Every senior. Every single one of them. In the game’s final five minutes, it was as if each of them were given one unscripted encore, one final curtain call.

Jalen Adaway hit a bomb at the shot-clock buzzer

Jaren Holmes drew a critical charge, and knocked down two essential foul shots.

Dominick Welch hit the kind of shot that old-timers will be remembering 50 years from now, a pump-fake, off-balance 3 that had zero chance of going in the basket until it actually splashed in the basket.

Lofton hit his free throws, then cleverly guided and goaded Virginia’s Kihei Clark to go all the way to the basket …

… where Osunniyi was waiting for him.

You can tell me there are no celestial assists for something as trivial as sports, and normally I might agree with you. But you do wonder if perhaps St. Bonaventure and St. Francis might not have been watching the game together Tuesday night — surely ESPN is available in Heaven? — saw how things were going, and came to the same conclusion.

“Well. Maybe just this one time.”

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We will enjoy this, of course. We know how fragile it all is. Many of us still bear wounds from lost seasons — from lost decades. Some of us spent all four years wondering if we would ever see the Bonnies play a game beyond the inevitable first-round knockout in the A-10. (Me? I was 0-for-4 in the A-10 from 1985-89, and 46-66 my four years, and when I graduated it was the worst four-year record ever; within a few years it was barely in the bottom 10). We understand where we were when Mark Schmidt arrived in 2007, and where we’ve gotten to these last 11 years, the three NCAAs, the two NITs.

We don’t take these things for granted.

So we will enjoy this week. We will savor the saloons before and after the game — do we daresay games? — and we will enjoy every second of the MSG experience. It’s actually been way too long since the Bonnies played in the World’s Most Famous Arena (for the record: Jan. 21, 1999, a 69-61 loss to Fordham) and even longer since they won there (74-72, overtime, over Iona in the first round of the 1985 Holiday Festival). But the memories there are … well, they are glorious.

The 94-91 win over Houston that clinched the ’77 NIT remains the program’s pinnacle. The 1969-70 team blitzed through the ’69 Holiday Festival, beating NYU, St. Joseph’s and Purdue by a combined 294-196, with Bob Lanier dropping 50 on the Boilermakers in the final. On New Year’s Eve 1960, the third-ranked Bonnies fought No. 1 Ohio State to the very end of an 84-82 Buckeyes win that folks were still talking about a half-century later. And nine months earlier, the Stith brothers Sam (37) and Tom (26) had combined for 63 points when the Bonnies ambushed St. John’s in the NIT, 106-71.

Maybe the Bonnies didn’t get any home games in the NIT.

But they’re going to get at least one this week. All due respect to Xavier, which has a terrific fan base, but MSG is going to sound like the RC Tuesday night, just louder. And if there’s a Thursday night for the Bonnies … well, unless there’s a secret pocket of Washington State or Texas A&M fans lurking somewhere in Gotham, that’s going to be even better.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We are, after all, Bonaventure — the good journey. We appreciate the ride every bit as much as the destination. And, goodness, what a ride it’s been. What a journey.

Maybe the best journey.