The phone rang in Benny Dees' Vidalia, Ga., home a few minutes before 5 p.m. Sunday.
"Can you believe the school we helped take to Division I more than 40 years ago is in the Final Four?" L.J. Kilby asked his former coach at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Replied Dees after VCU's stunning upset of Kansas: "No, I can't. It's really something to see how far they've come."
When the Final Four begins Saturday evening inside Houston's Reliant Stadium, the current version of the VCU Rams will take the raised court against Butler around 6:09. Kentucky will face Connecticut in the nightcap, with the winners playing for the national championship on Monday.
UK and UConn have been there and done that before, having cut down the nets nine times between them. Though Butler still is regarded as something of a Cinderella when it comes to March Madness, the Bulldogs' Hinkle Field House is basketball royalty.
Then there's VCU, which wasn't even VCU until the year Dees recruited Kilby.
"They called it Richmond Professional Institute - RPI," said Dees, who once coached at Western Carolina. "And the basketball team was a club team. No scholarships. No conference. Nothing."
But in 1968, RPI and the Medical College of Virginia merged to form VCU. Dees was hired by school president Warren Brandt to build a program. They played NAIA ball one season, then went Division I soon after.
Kilby, who would become an assistant under three different coaches at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and later head the Cleveland State Community College program, was one of Dees' first signees. He joined the Rams out of Ferrum Junior College.
"They had this tiny gym - you couldn't get 1,000 people in it," Kilby said. "But they told us they were building a new one, which they did. But when I came for my recruiting visit, they barely showed me either one. They drove me through the campus really quickly, then headed out to the University of Richmond campus, which was beautiful. Looking back on it, I may have thought I was actually going there."
David Hobbs, a former Alabama head coach, was in that recruiting class with Kilby.
"Yeah, Benny didn't talk much about our campus. I think they took everybody to Richmond's campus," Hobbs said.
Said Dees: "I'll tell you what it was like. That first year I ended up turning a broom closet into an office. And there were three of us in that office - me, an assistant and a secretary. But we started a basketball team."
A little more than a decade later, Hobbs returned to VCU as an assistant for defensive wizard J.D. Barnett. The Rams would go to five NCAA Tournaments in six years, but never deep into the tournament.
"When we first got there they'd call us V-C-Who on the recruiting trail," Hobbs said. "But the year Georgia went to the Final Four (1983), we had them beat in the tournament, then let them off the hook. We never could last long in the tournament."
Kilby will tell you they almost didn't last long, period.
"We were taking a charter flight to play Akron," he said. "When we took off I said to Dave, 'Did you hear the landing gear squealing? That doesn't sound right.' Then it did it again when we landed. Then it did it again when we took off to come home and when we landed in Richmond. I was scared to death the whole time.
"Well, about two weeks later we're watching the news one night and they break in with a news bulletin. A plane had just had to make an emergency landing on its belly because its landing gear failed. It was the same plane we'd been on. That was the last time we flew a charter."
The Rams' chartered flight to Houston had no such troubles this week. Like the other three teams in the Final Four, VCU is expected to take the floor for a public practice this afternoon before more than 40,000 people.
Come Saturday, Hobbs will nervously watch the game in his Birmingham home. Down in Vidalia, Dees will clutch his lucky buckeye tight and "Rub it for VCU."
Dees also said, "If they keep shooting 3-pointers the way they have been, they're going to win the whole thing."
As for Kilby, he expects to "lay out all my VCU stuff, just to show my sons I really did play there."
Then he'll spend much of the game taking walks outside his Cleveland home because "I'll be too nervous to watch."
But win or lose, there's one question about his alma mater that Kilby never will have to answer again.
"For as long as I can remember, whenever I've told somebody I went to VCU, they'll ask, 'Where's that?'" Kilby said. "I guarantee you they know where it is now."