The best thing?

The very best thing?

It came out of nowhere.

"No one could have ever planned it," says Jim Squadrito.

And no one would have believed it.

No one would have ever believed that a little college in Providence would become one of the most improbable basketball stories of the year, a team that was inducted into the Bryant Hall of Fame last night, the first team in the school's history to be so honored.

It was the winter of 1967, Vietnam all over the news, the Summer of Love only a few months away, and across town at Providence College, a kid named Jimmy Walker was the highest scorer in the country.

Bryant was a small school on Providence's East Side then, a few buildings on Hope Street. In Squadrito's memory, it cost something like $800 a year. The gym was too small to have games in, so the team played down the street at Hope High School. Their nickname was the Indians. Bryant was in something called the NAIA then, an amalgamation of small schools across the country, and in that winter they finished the regular season undefeated.

Making it better was they were as Rhode Island as coffee milk and the Democratic party. The coach was Tom Duffy from Pawtucket. The star was Tom Smile, from Tolman High School in Pawtucket, who put up the kind of scoring numbers that drew national attention, second in NAIA scoring that year to a kid from from Winson-Salem, the same kid who later would become NBA star Earl "The Pearl" Monroe.

Virtually the entire roster had come out of Rhode Island high schools, blue-collar kids most of them, many of them first generation to go to college; kids who by an accident of time and place had come together to own a basketball winter.

One was Squadrito, who wanted to go to Colgate to play football. Until Duffy came along, offered him a few bucks to stay home and play some ball alongside Smile, his old high school teammate.

"I didn't even know what Bryant was," he says. "I thought it was a secretarial school and I didn't want to be a secretary."

Another was Tony DeQuattro.

He was an even more unlikely than Squadrito to end up at Bryant. To end up anywhere at all, actually.

He grew up in Federal Hill, didn't even play basketball at La Salle. After high school, he went into the National Guard, went away to basic training. College? College was something other kids did. But in the fall of 1963 a friend told him about Bryant, and lo and behold, the kid who hadn't even played high school basketball now had a second chance.

"I was elated to be playing basketball at a college," he says.

In many ways, their teammates' stories were similar, a roster full of kids that bigger schools didn't want. A roster full of kids who got the chance to find a second act. A roster full of kids who found a slice of local fame they never could have envisioned.

There was co-captain Ted Alsup, who was from East Providence. There was John McVeigh from Cumberland. There were freshman Don Gray and George Yates, who had both played for Rogers, where the assistant coach had been a young teacher named Don Carcieri.

"We all knew our roles," says DeQuattro, one of the co-captains that year. "I think everyone was just thrilled to be getting the chance to play college basketball. Those were the happiest days of my life."

Once, there might have been something like 20 people at the games at Hope High School. That winter the gym was packed, complete with stories here in The Journal, a state discovering Bryant in ways they never had before.

Or as Duffy used to say, "We brought Bryant fron the obituaries to the front page."

On the night they played Salem State in the first round of the NAIA regional tournament at Rhode Island College in late February, pictures of the entire team were spread across the top of The Evening Bulletin, over a headline that said, "Little Giants Clash Tonight." Bryant was 22-0. But they lost that night, and it all ended, like some comet that already has streaked across the nighttime sky.

Now it's 40 years later.

Smile and Alsup, two of the co-captains, are dead. The newspaper accounts of the team are yellow and faded. The rest of the players are no longer young. Bryant has been in Smithfield since the early '70s, on a spiffy campus that's light years away from the one that used to be on Providence's East Side. Two years ago the team went to the Division II national semifinals, the school's greatest athletic moment.

Still, that 1967 team's legacy endures.

And it's more than the bond they all still have, the realization that they shared something special in that long-ago winter, the kind of dream season few teams ever get a chance to experience. It's the realization that they were the start of something, the team that put Bryant sports on the map, the building block to what would come later.

"We didn't know what we accomplished," says DeQuattro, who went on to teach in Bristol for 30 years.

Squadrito went on to be the national sales manager of 3M, and there are times now he drives around the Bryant campus, the school that's so different from what he went to, and thinks "We had a part of this."

Yes, they did.

breynold@projo.com / (401) 277-7340