Dare to Dream

Connecticut Basketball's Remarkable March to the National Championship
I was down to my last dress shirt, and it was not a great shirt. I guess that is what happens when you never have been to the final game of the Final Four. You simply don't know how to pack. Other things seem more important.

The sleeves on the shirt were about an inch too short. The collar on the shirt simply wouldn't settle, the white wings on either side of my tie looking like they had started to fly out the windows of the suite at the Hyatt Regency Westshore in Tampa and into the Florida sky. I was not a picture from Gentlemen's Quarterly.

"You don't have something else?" my wife, Pat, asked as I finished dressing.

"It's all that was left in the bag," I replied.

There was no debate about the tie. It was the same patterned purple tie I'd worn nine days earlier at the America West Arena in Phoenix, Arizona. It was a match for the black suit I'd also worn at the America West Arena. A friend, Bill Mitchell, a clothier in Westport, Connecticut, had given me three suits to wear for the weekend, but I was sticking with ... read full excerpt from: Dare to Dream ebook