I’m eating a hotel lobby breakfast today and I have to laugh. Funny what can remind you of monumental occasions. Here we are, on the cusp of another postseason, and a bagel, of all things, got me thinking.

I mean, was it really four years ago WVU shocked the college basketball establishment and shockingly rallied to the final round of the Big East Tournament?

Yes.

Have you forgotten how hard that really was that year?

Also yes.

Begin with the well-choreographed team’s trip to NYC. When the Mountaineers arrived at the Clarksburg airport, it was learned they were looking at a three-hour delay.

“When we finally took off, the plane began to circle,” John Beilein told me. “It had not been de-iced. And it had problems with its automatic deicer, so we could not go through any airport where there were clouds.”

That eliminated the New York area airports. WVU flew to Scranton, Pa., where it’d drive six or so hours to Manhattan and the team hotel. Ten miles outside The City, the bus was stalled by a hazardous materials spill. The Mountaineers were stuck in place for 90 minutes and moved maybe two miles in two hours.

“I just thought, ‘There is no way this is the way I want things to happen,’” Beilein said. “But I noticed in the back of the bus the kids were laughing and having fun and they weren’t really aware what was going on. And that was a situation where we weren’t going to get to the hotel until 12 or 1 o’clock and we still had an early game the next day. But it turned out to be a godsend for us.”

Without any signs of suffering, the team played cards and chatted and joked and seemed to enjoy the delay. WVU arrived at the team hotel after midnight. It would play Providence at noon. It would demolish Providence at noon.

Trouble was this was a team that lived for routine and the routine it had planned was all out of whack. So the players and coaches tried their hardest to remember what they’d done the night before and the morning of the game and then repeated it all the next occasion.

Everything would be as close to identical as possible. Meet in the same rooms. Sit next to the same people. Eat the same things. So on and so forth.

The morning of the Providence game, Mike Gansey was preparing a bagel. When he split it, one half fell in the garbage. Mike Gansey doesn’t eat garbage, so he let it go and settled for a half a bagel.

In the locker room that afternoon, Patrick Beilein approached Gansey with a request.

“‘Mike, tomorrow you have to drop your bagel into the garbage can like you did before,’” Beilein said. “So the next day, he opened it and dropped it in the trash again and we won again. After that, he kept getting his bagel, opening it and dropping one half in the garbage and putting the other half in the toaster.”

That second win against Boston College, punctuated by the unforgettable chants of “ACC” for the departing Eagles, wasn’t without distraction. Tyrone Sally was sick and tried to hide it from everyone until he disappeared from a team meeting and was discovered because he’d interrupted the routine. Frank Young stepped in and stepped up and WVU won. The routine was the same again the next day, complete with Young in the starting five, and another win followed.

WVU would lose in the final to Syracuse, but the confidence to surge into the Elite Eight was cemented.

“You know, you go through stuff like that and we started to think we deserved to do well,” Gansey said. “Sitting in traffic for two hours and you can’t do anything, Tyrone getting sick, we started to believe we deserved to do well. It was kind of like a give-and-take off of all that.”