That The Ville has The Basketball Tournament crowds at Freedom Hall rocking won’t just be nostalgia that stays in the summertime. Coach Pat Kelsey will have Louisville men’s basketball back to the level where going to games is fun again.
Where setting aside extra time to navigate the traffic at the KFC Yum! Center was a must to arrive on time. Where planning personal events around home games for the Cardinals was a common practice.
It’s OK to need a reminder of what it used to be like.
The Ville’s TBT team , made up mostly of U of L alumni, is happily providing the flashbacks. They will play in the regional championship Wednesday against Team DRC to try to become one of the last eight teams remaining.
A win would set up a meeting with La Familia , the Kentucky alumni team playing in its first TBT, in the quarterfinals.
They’re all grown men now, some even with families, but seeing Russ Smith doing the things that got him named "Russdiculous" by former coach Rick Pitino harkens back to when he was just a precocious kid.
And seeing the lot of them — like Peyton Siva and Montrezl Harrell who played on the 2013 national championship team — in a sense is like reliving that special season again.
That’s got to be part of the draw for the fans who made Saturday’s win over UKnighted, a team of Bellarmine alumni, the fourth-largest crowd in TBT history with 5,987 attending.
There’s support for former players, and then there’s clamoring for something to cheer about. Those moments have been few and far between for the Cards recently.
Louisville basketball hasn’t been Louisville basketball since the pandemic.
There was the patchwork 2020-21 season in which they played just 20 games after several were postponed when players tested positive for COVID-19. And the Cards did not get an invite to the NCAA Tournament bubble in Indianapolis.
The 2021-22 season where then-head coach Chris Mack quit or was escorted out — however you want to term it — midway through the season. After a 4-0 start in ACC play, the Cards won just three games the rest of the season.
The first season under coach Kenny Payne went shockingly south quickly. Then the death of Hall of Famer Denny Crum , the program’s patriarch, added to the gloom.
Payne’s second season started with promise but ended up sinking the program to a level of apathy that once seemed impossible for basketball in this city.
The Ville is a refreshing reminder that bad basketball is an aberration here, but it’s been since the 2019-20 season that things felt somewhat normal.
The Cards had reached No. 1 in The Associated Press Top 25 poll for just the third time in program history and were as high as No. 5 in February. They finished tied for second in the ACC standings and were one of a handful of schools considered a serious national title contender.
But, of course, that season ended with the cancellation of the ACC Tournament and the NCAA Tournament later following suit.
So technically the 2019 season remains the last time U of L was in the NCAA Tournament.
Maybe that changes this season; maybe it will take Kelsey another year to get them back in.
That’s the unknown part for Kelsey, who attended Monday’s TBT win over Sideline Cancer with his son Johnny, after signing 13 new players to his roster.
What’s clear is that Kelsey has the energy and the acumen to restore the buzz back at the KFC Yum! Center and return Louisville basketball back to its traditional spot in college basketball.
Reach sports columnist C.L. Brown at clbrown1@gannett.com , follow him on X at @CLBrownHoops and subscribe to his newsletter at profile.courier-journal.com/newsletters/cl-browns-latest to make sure you never miss one of his column s.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Brown: The Ville is preview of energy Pat Kelsey will bring back to Louisville basketball
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