For three SD State players, NCAA title game is the COVID do-over no one else got

The bleak day three years ago everyone can’t forget for different reasons, Nathan Mensah remembers for what was supposed to be his fresh start. The San Diego State forward had missed three months because of a blood clot in his lung, and on Thursday, March 12, 2020, doctors finally cleared him to return.

He texted his teammate, Malachi Flynn, the All-American star of the Aztecs’ 30-2 team that was headed for a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament at worst. His good news quickly turned sour. He found out, a hair later than the rest of us, the world as we knew it was on pause.

“The day it got canceled, I just got cleared to play basketball again,” Mensah said. “So I was unaware. I texted Malachi (Flynn), ‘Hey, I’ve been cleared.’ And he responded by saying, ‘Haven’t you heard?’ I was like, ‘Heard what?’ He was like, ‘It got canceled.’”

Mensah can tell the story, now, at the Final Four on the eve of the national championship, with a smile. His health has recovered. COVID became part of the background thrum of our lives. And three players from that San Diego State team are getting the opportunity their teammates were denied three years ago — and doing what they deeply believe that team could have done.

They have gotten, culminating Monday night against Connecticut, what so very few of us got in that terrible spring.

A second chance.

In some ways, that’s a literal statement. Mensah, Adam Seiko and Aguek Arop are only here in Houston because the NCAA extended all of the athletes from that season an extra year of eligibility. All three decided to use their so-called COVID year to come back for one last season at San Diego State. (Which, if you have the chance to live in San Diego on scholarship, is a no-brainer anyway.)

“This is our COVID year,” Arop said. “So definitely this is our second chance.”

These Aztecs have gone on the run they envisioned with those Aztecs. What they lost three years ago, they’re getting back now. They are the lucky ones.

A spring and summer of loss

Because of the timing, the specific moments we all remember when the plague descended upon us, “the coronavirus” and college basketball will forever be emotionally and inextricably linked. The cancellation of conference tournaments, one after another, the Big East at halftime of a quarterfinal, was followed quickly by the cancellation of the NCAA Tournament, 74 hours before Non-selection Sunday.

Coming so close to the end, with only a few conference trophies already handed out — Wake Forest’s Steve Forbes, then at Southern Conference tournament champion East Tennessee State, can feel more of a sense of completion to that season than just about anyone — and the NCAA tournament only days away, the sense of overwhelming basketball loss turned out to be a preview of all the other losses to come.

The graduations, weddings and celebrations that never happened. The jobs that evaporated, the businesses shuttered. The lives lost. We were, for months, a nation in mourning, whether we realized it or not.

Of everything that would happen in the spring and summer of 2020 as the world navigated a pandemic unseen in a century, San Diego State felt it first, acutely, in its own way.

“I was at home watching ESPN when they canceled the season. I had no words. I was speechless,” Seiko said. “All the work we put in, for it to come to an end there. Potentially we felt we were going to win it all. Especially for the guys, K.J. (Feagin), Malachi, Yanni (Wetzell), all the seniors, guys who were going to have big games in the tournament to help their future. It was devastating.”

That was a group that ripped through the regular season the same way Florida Atlantic did this year, undefeated until February, denied a conference title in one of the championship games that was actually played. The Aztecs would have started the NCAA Tournament near home in Sacramento, and had as good a chance as anyone to reach the Final Four thanks to the ferocious defense that remains in evidence this season and a legit star in Flynn.

Seiko, Arop and Mensah were all bench options on that team, Mensah the first forward off the bench when healthy, Arop and Seiko playing less but regularly in the rotation. But they were essential cogs in the bigger machine that San Diego State became that season, a top-10 defense nationally with an offense only slightly less efficient.

“A lot of people doubted us, how good we actually were in 2020,” Arop said. “We didn’t get a chance to showcase it.”

It was a team no opponent wanted to see, and in a tournament that never happened, no one ever did.

Their future is now

Time passed. Vaccines emerged. The virus slowly faded from the front of our collective consciousness, where it had taken up space for months. The other would-be champions of 2020 evolved and evaporated as players departed, coaches retired, the world moved on.

These opportunities come along reasonably often at places like Kansas or Duke — and Ochai Agbaji. Kansas’ third-leading scorer in 2020, was the most outstanding player of the Final Four a year ago — but not as regularly at a place like San Diego State.

Dayton, flying high at 29-2 with a potential player of the year in Obi Toppin, was in a similar spot in 2020: a team from outside the power conferences having a season where everything fell into place. Toppin’s in the NBA and the Flyers haven’t been back to the NCAA Tournament since.

For programs outside the power conferences, even those just barely on the perimeter, these moments can be fleeting at best, ephemeral at worst.

But Brian Dutcher is still coaching at San Diego State, and the Aztecs have made the NCAA Tournament in each year since. Steve Fisher, who retired in 2017, set the bar high. Still, the thought of what that 2020 team was denied has never strayed far from the minds of the players who are left from it. Some of those long-departed players have even been able to attend some of these tournament games.

“We’re just proud to make those guys happy,” Seiko said. “We’re motivated by them and what they did. They’re all rooting for us. Every single one of them. Those are my guys.”

From more humble beginnings and with a different surrounding cast, coming off back-to-back first-round NCAA losses the past two seasons, they have nevertheless traversed the path they hoped to travel three years ago, to play for a national title.

“We get a second chance to redeem what that team would have done, with the coaching staff that we had,” Mensah said. “Most people might say they will never know what might happen, but this team was a proven statement that that team could have done this, just as this team has done this.”

Fate bequeathed these San Diego State players with the second chance none of the rest of us will ever have. Their future is now.

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