Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
On the bus ride home, Vaughn Duggins remembered, all was somber — until it wasn’t.
History changed, all for the betterment of Wright State, with a 15-minute delay.
“It was the first time I ever celebrated after a loss,” Duggins said recently on his induction weekend into the WSU athletic Hall of Fame.
On Thursday night, Feb. 22, 2007, the Raiders expected to finish their regular basketball season at Youngstown State with a 10th straight victory to seal the top seed and guarantee home court for all their Horizon League tournament games.
All WSU had to do was beat a 12-15 Youngstown State team on a cold, snowy night at YSU’s Beeghly Center. Over in Indianapolis, Butler was hosting Loyola-Chicago, 19-9, but not expecting to lose. Butler, after all, was ranked No. 15 in the nation.
That game’s tip was 15 minutes after Wright State’s.
Earlier in the season, WSU beat YSU 62-49 in the Nutter Center.
All this came to mind several days ago when YSU visited the Nutter Center to finish WSU’s regular-season home schedule. It brought back a head-throbbing flashback.
It turned out, in 2007 not only did the Raiders have problems, so did Dayton Daily News columnist Tom Archdeacon and I.
Wright State lost, 72-57, and while Arch and I began writing our obituaries of a team that had apparently ceded the No. 1 tournament seed to Butler, it was with the understanding Butler would now host the tournament.
All the Bulldogs had to do was beat Loyola.
Just to make sure, we turned our computers to the streaming play-by-play of the Butler/Loyola game, only to find it much closer than expected. A frantic call to the newspaper desk gained us a few extra minutes of writing time, since much more than just the WSU score was involved.
