STEPHENVILLE, Texas. - The Victory is only five days old, but for Grace College Basketball coach Jim Kessler the immediacy already is fading, the moments receding toward that place where fond memory pools fresh and deep.

Scott Blum, the wounded leading scorer rising up for the three-pointer.

Brian Elliott burning with fever, ripping away a rebound.

The triumph. The title. The journey home through a sleepless night, the reception back in Winona Lake and Warsaw, the realization coming through foggy fatigue that there were no more games to win, no more teams to beat, no one left standing but them…

"Moments in time," muses Kessler, the NAIA Division II National Championship won by Grace last week already a part of history. "You know I've been there before, and lost, and it's disappointing, and there's an emptiness in losing. But there's an emptiness in winning, too. Because it goes so quickly, a moment in time, and it's gone."

Gone but never forgotten. Years from now they'll still be talking about Blum and Elliot and David James and Joe Bennett and all the others, this battered host from Grace College who rose to great heights and balanced there, for a sweet moment in time.

Everyone one will remember something. Some will remember only the end: the 32-5 record; Blum playing with a stress fracture and a dislocated finger and James with a broken nose; Elliott rising from his sickbed to play for the national championship with a 103-degree fever.

Yet it is not just what happened at the end that Kessler will take away from this most special of seasons. He reaches down and stirs the pool of memory, and what comes up are other things. A look in the eye. A whisper in a place of shout. Pain and Gain.

He looks back, and what he sees is last autumn, when the team got together and everyone wrote down goals for the season. Among them, huge and unthinkable, was the idea of winning the last game of the season.

"There was just this… silence," Kessler recalls. "The guys kind of looked around. I think we realized what that would mean."

That was the start of it. Later would come the infamous Pain Parties, a weekly 23 minutes of running that showed Kessler the depth of the team work ethic. Later still would come the loss to Bethel, and a postgame practice from which the players would receive a quiet whisper of purpose.

"Their heads were down and they were really expecting punishment," Kessler recalls. "So I forewent my usual ranting, and I whispered to them. I said if you play to your potential, you can win the national championship."

The heads popped up, surprised. They looked at Kessler, and he looked back, and in their faces he saw the beginning of resolve that would carry them to Stephenville Texas, and the NAIA National Championship.

The Lancers didn't lose again until Franklin defeated them to knock them out of the district title. Still, the resolve remained. They got an at-large bid to the tournament and they were off, ignoring the aches and pains, marching into the championship game against Northwestern Iowa.

In the locker room before the game, Kessler didn't talk about winning. He talked about will, and how every game affords an opportunity for it to break, and when you give in to that opportunity is when you begin to lose.

"It's often not the best team that wins," Kessler told his players. "It's the team with the most will."

And then he sent them out, and the game ran along, and soon Northwestern was up by four with time slipping away. The test of will had arrived.

"It looked bleak to me then," Kessler recalls. "I was thinking, 'What am I going to tell these men when it's all over, and and we lost the lead and the game?'"

As it turned out, he had to tell them nothing but congratulations. Elliott scored underneath. James horsed in a rebound off his own miss. The game went into overtime, and then Blum rose up to bury a three-pointer that buried Northwestern for good.

"That put them into a position to play catchup," Kessler says. "And I think that's when their will broke."

Sure. He had said it hadn't he? It's often not the best team that wins. It's the team with the most will.

Well. Suddenly , the team with the most will was the national champion. They would come home, fuzzy with lack of sleep, and everyone would turn out to greet them, and pretty soon the moment would become a memory. But it was one they would never forget.

"It's a permanent change that's taken place in us." Kessler says softly from five days away. "It's over now, and there's a sense of 'What's next?' But we'll never be the same."


*Written by Ben Smith of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (March 23, 1992)