With Your No. 21/25 Temple Owls playing Bowling Green tonight back at McGonigle Hall in a Turn Back the Clock event, we’ve been reminded of our one and only opportunity to catch a game at the old gym back in the day. It was Feb. 23, 1995, and the Owls were playing UMass, which at the time was ranked No. 5 in the country. But we never made it inside, and the memory honestly still stings a little. The complete story is after the jump.

We were sophomores at La Salle, living in the dorms, and we happened to live directly across the hall from a kid who was a Massachusetts native who really liked UMass hoops. These were the days when John Calipari had cheated crafted the Minutemen into national powers with players such as Marcus Camby and Lou Roe. And because La Salle had not yet joined the A-10, UMass was not coming to Philly to play the Explorers that year. Nonetheless, our resourceful Massachusetts friend somehow managed to score five tickets for a ginormous Thursday night game against Temple at McGonigle. And we were all fired up for it.

One problem: Only four people could go. And for whatever reason, we couldn’t find a fifth. Solution? We’d sell the ticket outside the gym, figuring there’d be plenty of demand from Temple fans who wanted to get inside but couldn’t. So we took the subway from Broad and Olney down to Broad and Cecil B. Moore, walked up the block, stood outside McGonigle and looked around. Within seconds, our boy had a buyer. And not long after that, he also had a cop giving him shit for attempting to scalp the ticket. Now, bear in mind that our boy was not looking to make money off this transaction; he merely wanted to get something for it so we could get inside. We don’t even think he was exchanging the ticket for more than 20 bucks. But it didn’t matter. On this cold winter’s night, Mr. Cop was not in a good mood: He decided to punish our boy (and, as it turned out, the rest of us) by seizing all five tickets. Which meant we weren’t getting in.

Disappointed and dejected, we got back on the subway and headed north back to La Salle. We ended up at a party where the game was being shown on TV — we believe ESPN was carrying it nationally — and where we were more or less incapable of doing anything besides sinking deeper and deeper into our chairs as the Owls simply destroyed the Minutemen from the start, with tiny McGonigle Hall absolutely rocking and rolling the whole time. Oh, how it sucked to not be there. The final — we looked it up, just as we did the date of the game — was Temple 72, UMass 63. But it wasn’t that close. And we missed the whole thing. Damn.

Link: Dunph excited to play at McGonigle [Philly Hoops Insider]
Photo credit: [Temple University]

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