It was fun while it lasted, this Cinderella story that was quickly written but will long be remembered. 

“Our students have already won,” UMBC president Freeman Hrabowski said Sunday afternoon, a few hours before the men’s basketball team that two days earlier launched the Catonsville university into the national consciousness played an unlikely second game in this year’s NCAA tournament, “and for the rest of their lives and for the rest of UMBC’s existence, and that’s forever, we will be known as the institution that made history.” 

That, of course, happened Friday night, when the Retrievers trended all over social media while becoming the first 16-seed to ever upset a No. 1 in the first round of the annual rite of spring known as March Madness. They did it by 20 points no less against the tournament’s top overall seed, Virginia. 

Just by having a reason to throw on their gold and black jerseys again Sunday for a second-round game against ninth-seeded Kansas State meant UMBC—U Must Be Cinderella, the University of Millions of Brackets Crushed, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County—had accomplished something that never had been done before.

Second-year coach Ryan Odom’s 15 Retrievers (of the Chesapeake Bay variety, as the nation learned this weekend) nearly extended the fairytale another week. They scrapped and clawed and willed their way against another major conference power for two-plus hours Sunday night, in what was a one-point game with less than six minutes left, but ultimately fell, 50-43.   

You wouldn’t have known the outcome afterward looking at Hrabowski, who was all smiles as he absorbed a hug from UMBC’s anthropomorphic, fuzzy brown mascot, True Grit, and led cheers in front of the small section of fans inside the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. Instead of heading to the locker room, the team saluted their family, friends and faithful, too.

It seemed a lifetime of memories were made in a three-day span. The feel-good story. National attention. Free publicity. It’s what any relatively small public institution like the one located just off the Beltway southwest of the city, known more for its academics than athletics, dreams about. Just think, anyone who Googled enough or heard by word of mouth, could have learned the life story of the 52-year-old institution, its men’s basketball players, and staff. 

There was a first-person story written by Hrabowski on Sunday, which outlined the big picture and filled in the details. The university’s birth in 1963, as a school that would serve students of all races during a time when much of America was still segregated. The contributions of philanthropist Robert Meyerhoff to the cause. And the fact that school, population 14,000, is now is a top producer of African-American graduates who go on to earn PhDs in the sciences, and is the leading producer of ones who go on to earn MD-PhDs. 

There was the measured head coach Ryan Odom, who looked somehow like he had been here before. The son of former Wake Forest head coach, Dave, who was also a former Virginia assistant, was a ballboy for the Cavaliers when his father worked in Charlottesville. The 43-year-old inherited a program that went 9-51 the two years before his arrival and he’s now one of the hottest coaching commodities in the nation after leading a pair of 20-plus win seasons.

There were plenty of other articles in various outlets written about star Jairus Lyles, explaining his roundabout journey to suburban Baltimore by way of Virginia Commonwealth and Robert Morris universities. After being courted by big conference programs after last season, he elected to stay at UMBC and pursue a master’s degree, earning a 4.0 grade point average in the fall. 

There was the jubilant, unreal scene in the post-game locker room on late Friday night, after Lyles led the upset with 28 points, where a few bench players shared how the video game Fortnite may have partially inspired the historic victory. The team didn’t get back to its Holiday Inn hotel until 5 a.m., but when they did a welcome crew awaited. And so did the unexpected need to do laundry for a second and third day in town.

There were athletic communications staffer Zach Seidel’s tweets heard round the world. Followers of @UMBCAthletics now number more than 110,000, a 1,700% increase from tipoff of Friday night’s game.

And there was tiny point guard K.J. Maura. “I’m 5-foot-7 on a good day,” he told the media more than once. He well represented his home country of Puerto Rico and whose father celebrated his son by hoisting an oversized cardboard cutout of his Under Armour head-banded noggin for two games straight.

“I wrote one word on the board [in the locker room] about how I felt about them and it was proud,” Odom said Sunday night. “This was just really special.” It was a short story, yes, but an unforgettable one.

From the last-second shot that sent them to the NCAA tournament and their university president’s bromance with their star player Jairus Lyles, to the school’s acronym that might make a few people wonder, “What’s that?” when they see it on screen Friday night, and even the program’s Chesapeake Bay retriever mascot, True Grit, the UMBC men’s basketball team has a bit of that lovable underdog feeling around it right now.
 

Dare we say, Cinderella?
 

There’s only one men’s team from the Baltimore area, and all of Maryland and Washington, D.C., participating in March Madness this year (if you’re reading this it means you’re late filling out your office bracket), and it is the UMBC Retrievers, who started the craziness early by shocking favorited Vermont in the America East title game Saturday. Lyles, a Silver Spring native and a graduate student at UMBC, drained a 23-footer with 0.6 seconds left to complete the 65-62 comeback win.
 

The reward? The conference title, which gave mid-major UMBC its first NCAA tournament spot since 2008, in just head coach Ryan Odom’s second season.  

But that achievement also brought with it a David vs. Goliath task: a first-round match-up with the 68-team bracket’s No. 1 overall seed, Virginia, in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Cavaliers, the ACC champs with a 31-2 record, are expected to win by 21 points, according to the Las Vegas sports books, and they feature the top defense in the nation and potential future NBA talent.
 

“The way we won that game in Vermont was a storybook ending,” Odom said Wednesday. “That’s a lot to digest. We had a lot coming at us. And so I just encouraged the guys that we have to turn the page now. But now we’ve got a massive challenge staring us in the face, and if we don’t prepare the right way, it won’t go well.”
 

A 16-seed has never beaten a No. 1 in the NCAA men’s tournament. Traditionally these types of games have been blowouts. But Virginia coach Tony Bennett (bet he’s never heard a “can he sing?” joke), speaking to reporters this week, didn’t sound as if he found the Retrievers, who went 24-10 this season, a pushover.  

“Good basketball knows no division or limits,” he said. “They can spread the floor and shoot the three [pointer] at a high clip. They’re very versatile and defend solid. They know how to play the game. You watch all that stuff and you’re impressed.”
 

You’ll likely notice the Retrievers do-it-all 5-foot-8 point guard, K.J. Maura. He’s from Puerto Rico and is shortest player ever to win the America East Defensive Player of the Year award. He might need to be aggressive against Virginia’s super-efficient, slow-down offensive style.  

And the 6-foot-2 guard Lyles will look to crack the Cavs’ tough defense. “He’s very quick and dynamic,” Bennett said of the Retrievers’ leading scorer (20.2 points per game). Though sadly the Virginia coach didn’t mention as part of his scouting report the unlikely friendship that Lyles—a 4.0 GPA student pursuing an M.A. in education—has forged with UMBC president Freeman Hrabowski (they text), who probably couldn’t be happier at the moment.  

The 52-year-old public university in Catonsville—well-regarded for its science, tech, and engineering education—has received a generous attention boost this week. And it will get some more exposure, win or lose, on a national platform for roughly two hours Friday night. That’s UMBC, the University of Maryland Baltimore County, of course, if any out-of-towners ask.

Game Time: No. 16 UMBC (24-10) vs. No. 1 Virginia (31-2), Approx. 9:20 p.m. ET Friday
NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, South Region, First Round
TV: TNT
Live Stream: NCAA March Madness Live

To celebrate its 15th anniversary in the city, Open Society Institute-Baltimore hosted Big Change Baltimore last year, bringing together innovative thinkers to discuss the most challenging issues facing the city.

The event, which attracted a sold-out crowd of 500 people to Center Stage, was so successful that OSI is hosting a second installment on October 27. “People care deeply about the city, but they may not feel hopeful,” says OSI-Baltimore’s director Diana Morris. “We want to give people a sense of the work that’s already underway on some of the toughest issues in the city.”

These issues include education, racial inequality, drug addiction, and criminal justice—topics that will be discussed by former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, Orange is the New Black writer Piper Kerman, racial justice expert Ian Haney López, and UMBC president Freeman A. Hrabowski III, among others. “I think it will be more like a conversation, where I will talk about the intersection of journalism and criminal justice,” says Keller, whose new website The Marshall Project launches this fall. “Baltimore is clearly a city that has been wrestling with the problems we’ll be writing about [on the site]: corruption, brutality, overcrowding.”

Kerman will discuss her personal experience in the criminal-justice system, as portrayed in the Netflix show based on her book. “It’s really important for me to remind people that the show is grounded in reality,” she says. “As a person of good fortune and privilege, it’s also important for me to talk about how not all Americans are policed equally.”

Morris says the discussion will also emphasize education reform, something that OSI-Baltimore has been focused on since its inception. “We’ve been able to get suspensions down, and get kids courses they need in a specialized way,” Morris says. “Sometimes hearing about solutions is even more important than discussing the problems.”

(See full interview with Piper Kerman.)