Signature victory justifies students’ storming of court

My roommate, former Illini Pride president and current Orange Krush Foundation board member Drew Logeman, is a relatively straight-arrow dude.

He’s pre-med and has gotten into a handful of medical schools already. He never goes out if he has something important to do the next day. He does the “right thing” probably more than anybody I know. He also loves Illinois athletics more than anyone I know.

And he rushed the court after the win against Michigan State on Saturday.

“The (Division of Intercollegiate Athletics) has strict rules about rushing the court,” a sweaty, postgame Logeman said. “Being a member of the OKFB, it was basically my job to stop people from rushing. I sensed it might happen, so I turned and blocked a few people and screamed, ‘Don’t rush the court! Do NOT rush the court!’ and it worked for a few seconds. But then I started to get pushed back, people got around me — so I joined in.”

His story is confirmed. If you watch the footage again, he’s the one in the Luther Head jersey on the bottom-left half of the screen, in the front row on the floor, just before the crowd rushed— his arms were wide and facing the crowd, and he was screaming.

Yet he was taken over.

I hate to have this be the primary point of this column, but it’s unavoidable.

The “GameDay” victory against No. 5 Michigan State has had a shadow cast over it by the public’s disapproval of the Krush Rush of the floor afterward.

Dick Vitale, on live national TV, talked about it for about two minutes straight — not a positive word in the bunch. Message boards have been buzzing with anti-rush sentiment since the second it happened. Even Illini prince Dee Brown took to Twitter, echoing the same views shared by Vitale and the boards: “WHY DID YOU STORM THE FLOOR no no no no!... WE ARE ILLINOIS winning should be normal.”

I’m going to respectfully disagree with each and every one of them.

We go to Illinois, a school that has a tremendous basketball history and is one of the better programs in the country. Make no mistake about it; despite the uproar over the Rose Bowl trip two years ago, Illinois is a basketball state and school. That’s where our primary source of athletic pride lies.

With that being said, the common thought is that we should have acted “like we’ve been there before.” OK, but that would have taken a Marlon Brando-type performance. The fact is, no student enrolled in the University knows what a home basketball victory of this magnitude feels like. We, in fact, have not “been there before.”

Until last night, the most exciting Illinois game many of us had ever been to at the Assembly Hall was the Eric Gordon game in 2008. The night that game was played, against No. 13 Indiana, the Illini were 10-13 overall and 2-8 in the Big Ten. The team had no hope of making any real noise, and we knew that. So we took it all out on Gordon. We poured everything we had onto the floor; our team did the same. And we lost.

You all had the Flyin’ Illini. You all had the Wake Forest game. Forget Saturday’s Spartan upset as the 2009-10 team’s signature win — it was this entire student body’s signature win.

For one day, the eyes of the college basketball world were on us. We had every high-profile ESPN name in our city, in our Hall and in front of our fans. We had the fifth-best team in the country visiting, the toast of our conference and as worthy of an opponent as you’ll ever come across.

So when we won, we charged.

When the security was breached, I also found my way onto the floor to investigate. I saw Mike Davis’ face, which held a smile that could’ve been seen from the moon. I saw Demetri McCamey standing on the scorer’s table and screaming that this was his house. I saw Brandon Paul and D.J. Richardson, soaking up every second of the scene, perhaps not quite understanding how rare this was but undoubtedly appreciating it. Seeing those looks, their body language — which couldn’t hide their pure, little-kid-in-a-candy-store jubilation — was something I’ll never forget.

Bruce Weber’s postgame response: “I think the whole day, the build-up ... You had some kids out there at 7 in the morning and what is it now, 10 something? They probably had so much Red Bull and so much energy that they didn’t know what they were doing. I don’t know if we needed to do it, but I think our kids loved it too — when we got to the locker room, half of them were still out there.”

You, older Illinois fans, should be proud. You should be proud of our passion, proud that you’ve passed the baton to a generation that will line up 512 students in the freezing cold just to ensure a floor seat for an ESPN show, not even a real game, the following morning. You should be proud that some of us rose before the sun to set up the morning of “GameDay,” and you should be proud that 4,143 people represented us on that telecast.

You should be proud that we summoned the glory days of the Orange Krush and helped will a formerly identity-less team to a victory over a national powerhouse. You should be proud that our team and our students, in a year of unmet potential and vast frustration, erupted in a way we’ll never forget.

This was our student body’s signature win, and it didn’t take Drew rushing the floor to prove it.

Though it sure didn’t hurt.

Rich Mayor is a senior in Media. He can be reached at rmayor2@illinimedia.com.