It was roughly 24 hours before the 2023 men’s national championship game when Bob Hurley Sr., wearing a faded maroon St. Anthony High School hat, started at the beginning.

Ellis Island. Late 1890s. That’s when both sides of his family, the O’Briens and Hurleys, came ashore from Cork, Ireland. Penniless, all of ’em. They settled in what amounted to an Irish tent city, before packing up and moving to St. Patrick’s parish in The Junction section of Jersey City, over by what is now Liberty State Park Station. The family grew, time moved forward, and Robert Hurley, the youngest of six boys, entered the world. In 1947, he had a son of his own — Bob. Robert was more of a baseball fan, but his son gravitated toward basketball.

“Working-class people,” Bob says. “My recollection of all these people coming up is everyone coming home on the bus with a newspaper wrapped up under their arm. They’d get home, then go to work the next day. World War II veterans. Everyone smoked.”

That, if you were wondering, is how the Hurleys got here.

But how did they get here, you ask? To this moment? To Dan, Bob’s youngest son, and Andrew, Dan’s youngest son, walking together across midcourt in front of 72,000 people? To Dan, with his arm slung over his son’s shoulder, saying, “Oh, look, look, look!” and pointing to a massive scoreboard as the opening keys are played to “One Shinning Moment” are played? To the Hurley family having its place in basketball lore expanded from legendary to … something else. Maybe, mythical?

To Connecticut 76, San Diego State 59, and the Huskies’ fifth national title since 1999?

Well, that’s another story. And it starts with Bob. And a small Catholic high school operated by the Felician Sisters. And the decisions to stay.

And it ends with a legacy.

Our world, this basketball world, would be a different place if it had spun a few degrees differently in August 1985. There was Bob Hurley, a 38-year-old father of three splitting time as both a Jersey City, N.J., probation officer and a wildly successful boy’s high school basketball coach at St. Anthony High School, a small college preparatory school operated by the Catholic Archdiocese of Newark. Every day was impossibly long. Practices scheduled around probation visits. Home, kids, sleep, alarm, do it all over. The team practiced at White Eagle Hall, a repurposed bingo parlor with no water fountain.

Then Pete Gillen called. The old Notre Dame assistant coach was on his way to Cincinnati, taking the head coaching job at Xavier, a small, modestly successful program in the Midwestern Collegiate Conference. Gillen wanted Hurley to join him.