Exactly two months to the day that Jeremy Jacobs left in his truck at 3:30 a.m. from College Station, Texas, and began a journey to Manhattan that ended with him pulling into the Vanier Family Football Complex parking lot at 1:30 p.m., the Kansas State Director of Strength and Conditioning now stands inside the team theater room on the third level wearing a purple hoodie with a white old-school Willie Wildcat cradling a football, and he lays down a little black book bearing a purple Powercat on the front cover.
This was different. Here was Ty Smolinski sitting in the coaches' meeting room at the head of the gray table in the black leather swivel chair where Kansas State head coach Pete Hughes usually sits. The 20-year-old sophomore wears his white ballcap with purple brim and a purple T-shirt with an old-school Willie Wildcat holding a baseball bat, he still wears purple supportive tape around his left wrist and lower forearm, and thick lines of eye black applied many hours ago begin to fade.
Kansas State isn't ready to return to the Little Apple. The bracket-busting, record-setting, hold-onto-your-seat Wildcats are having way too much fun during the most improbable run in the history of the Big 12 Women's Basketball Tournament.
One day after Kansas State hit a Big 12 Women's Basketball Tournament record 17 3-pointers to beat Cincinnati, the 12th-seeded Wildcats used some of their most stifling defense in recent memory to fuel a 58-51 comeback victory that bounced No. 5-seed and 21st-ranked Texas Tech out of the T-Mobile Center in Kansas City, Missouri.
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