In those days, you always knew when the old coach was in the office because that end of the Reilly Center bore the distinctive whiff of burning tobacco, as if Nat Sherman's had opened up a satellite shop on the Southern Tier. Invariably, if you followed the smoke – it was still perfectly normal to follow such scents indoors in those years – it would lead to an open door.
 
And to a smiling face, seated behind the desk of an office so small you couldn't believe it wasn't a broom closet (which, in fact, in its prior existence it had been).
 

"Come in and take a load off," Eddie Donovan would say, and within 10 minutes you were seated and you were off, joining Donovan as he shared his kaleidoscopic archive of old memories and old stories and old basketball players. Behind his desk was a picture of Donovan and Dave DeBusschere, arm in arm, from the night of March 24, 1981, when the New York Knicks retired DeBusschere's No. 22 jersey.
 
It was autographed.
 
"To Eddie," went the inscription, "thanks for everything."
 
It was Donovan, as general manager of the Knicks, who had traded for Dave DeBusschere early in the 1968-69 season in what is generally considered one of the great trades in the history of professional sports. It yielded two championships for the Knicks and a lasting place in the New York City sporting pantheon for Eddie Donovan.
 
But New York was never home for Donovan even if he'd grown up in Elizabeth, N.J., less than 20 miles from Madison Square Garden. 
 
"This," he said, spreading his arms out so wide he could practically touch both walls, "has always been my home."
 
It was surely a place he kept coming back to, lately as the assistant to the president at St. Bonaventure beginning in 1987. He'd built this impossible basketball dream here three decades earlier, gone on to conquer the pros, and found his way back.
 
"Not bad for an elementary school teacher, eh?" Donovan said.
 
It is good, today, to remember that most of the very best basketball coaches in St. Bonaventure history have two things very much in common:
 

1. They earned their college degrees at St. Bonaventure.
2. When they took over the job, they weren't what you would call traditional hires. And they took those jobs knowing theirs was a task of building – and often rebuilding – what had come before.

 
This started with Donovan, and this is as good a point as any to mention that the man he succeeded, Eddie Melvin, had been the first man to invent the notion that St. Bonaventure's basketball team could aspire to the same heights as its dear, departed football team. 
 
By then, Melvin was coaching teams to the NIT and to the big-time version of the sport. It should never be forgotten that Melvin, who founded this ambitious iteration of St. Bonaventure was a proud son of Duquesne; similarly, Mark Schmidt, who became synonymous with St. Bonaventure these last 19 years, spent his college years on the Heights at Boston College.
 
Greatness has been achieved by men who studied elsewhere.
 
But the tradition of Bonaventure basketball we have come to know was nurtured, and incubated, by four men who came in between, sandwiched by Melvin and Schmidt as bookends.
 
Now comes a fifth, Mike MacDonald, of the St. Bonaventure Class of 1988. He is the only coach in the sport's history who has won 100 games at Division I, Division II and Division III. He has won 522 games in his career. He went 61-3 the last two years at Daemen.
 
And there, for some, is the rub.
 
Daemen?
 
#########
 
"Look, when you're coaching for a living, you know right away if you can do it or you can't," Eddie Donovan said in the spring of 1987 to a wide-eyed reporter for The Bona Venture. "If you can, they let you keep doing it. It not, you'll find another career. It doesn't matter what else you bring to the table. Can you win? That's what matters."
 
Donovan really was an elementary-school teacher when Rev. Juvenal Lalor, O.F.M., president of St. Bonaventure, hired him on April 2, 1953. His career consisted of a 30-9 record at Olean High School and a 17-1 record coaching the Bonnies freshman team his senior year, when Melvin had convinced Donovan he'd be more useful as a coach than a player.
 
That was it.
 
The outcry, let it be known, was deafening.
 
"It didn't take long for people to get used to going to the NIT every year, like we started to do with Eddie," Donovan said that day, feet on the desk now, easing back into his chair and also into the watercolor memory of the spring of 1953. "People were outraged when the school let Eddie go. And it didn't help their mood any when they hired a high school coach."
 

That high school coach, it should be noted, took more than a small bit of runway to get acclimated. Donovan's first three teams: 12-11, 13-10, 11-12. That last record, 1955-56, was the final time the Bonnies would have a losing record for the next 29 years. Then a young sophomore named Larry Weise enrolled. He would joined by the Stith Brothers, by Whitey Martin, by Freddie Crawford, and soon Donovan would be off to the NBA.
 
And it started all over again. This time it was the spring of 1961. The Bonnies had spent much of the previous two years in the Top 10. This was one of the plumb jobs in America, coveted by many, notably the young coach at Belmont-Abbey, a fellow named Al McGuire.
 
Instead, on June 1, Weise was hired. He was 24 years old. On the one hand, he had an undefeated record as a head coach on the day he arrived. On the other, that 18-0 record had come at Rochester East High School. On the junior varsity team.
 
"If I tried to make a hire like that," Weise said with a laugh 27 years later, sitting in his own RC office, "they wouldn't just fire me, they'd take me away."
 
Once more, it was a slow process. Once more, the players began to arrive. And by 1970, Weise had assembled a team that will forever be known as plenty good enough to win a national championship if fate hadn't intervened. By 1973, Weise wanted to focus on being AD.

And it started all over, again. Again: this was a big-time job. Applicants came flooding in. A young head coach from Bucknell, Jim Valvano, called to ask about the job when he heard Weise was retiring; he was told they had their man. His name was Jim Satalin. He'd been the Bonnies freshman coach for three years, but paid his rent as a teacher at Hinsdale Central School.
 
"I'm overwhelmed," Satalin said on May 11, 1973. "It's hard for me to fathom."
 
(NOTE TO MIKE MACDONALD: You may wish to emulate much of what Satalin did across the next nine years. But leave those two sentences home when you have your press conference.)
 
Of course, Satalin was overwhelmed at first. And of course he grew into the job. He won the 1977 NIT. The '78 team went to the NCAA.
 
It stopped then, for a while.
 
When Satalin left for Duquesne in 1982, one of the first presumed names belonged to Jim Baron, who'd played for Satalin (as Satalin had for Weise, as Weise had for Donovan). He was only 26. But that fit a long pattern. Plus, with a year on Digger Phelps' staff at Notre Dame, he had a deeper resume than all of the coaches before him, combined.
 
He didn't get the job that time, Jim O'Brien did. He didn't get it in 1986, either; Ron DeCarli did. And he didn't get it in 1989, when the job went to Tom Chapman. By the time the call finally did arrive, in 1992, it was like a long-lost son returning to the family dinner table. And Baron was ready. Once more, a son of St. Bonaventure would lead the school to a new apex. That happened in 2000, a return to the NCAA Tournament after 22 years.
 
That, impossibly, was 26 years ago.
 
######
 
Once more, into the breach, into an uncertain time, an old Bonnie comes home. Like Donovan, MacDonald replaces a successful coach and faces some skeptics. Like Weise and Satalin, he takes the job at a time when it was easy to wonder – in the wake of the Stith brothers in '61, and Bob Lanier in 1970 then, in the wake of Schmidt's near 20 years of excellence – if St. Bonaventure could once again duplicate its recent path.

 
And like Baron, he returns to a program at a distinct crossroads of its history. In 1992 the university was faced with a fundamental question: is it even feasible to try to compete in Division I any longer? After that 29-year streak ended in 1984, the Bonnies suffered losing seasons in eight of the next nine years before Baron was hired on Aug 10, 1992.
 
It is an eerily similar question now, in an era where NIL is king and St. Bonaventure must make do with less than most of its competitors without much cause for complaint. Those were the rules in 1992. These are the rules in 2026. You abide, or you change course. St. Bonaventure chooses to abide.
 
And it chooses to go forward with perhaps the most accomplished of all Division II coaches at a time when that has become an acceptable – advisable, even – path to success. See what Ben McCollom has done at Iowa and Drake after winning big at Division II Northwest Missouri State. Look what Ben Schertz has done at Saint Louis and Indiana State after dominating at Lincoln Memorial. Heck, remember that Indiana coach Curt Cignetti had never coached a college game at a level higher than I-AA until 2024, when he was 63 years old.
 
There is no magic elixir in all of this, and MacDonald will be the first to tell you that. When you unroll your St. Bonaventure diploma, you do not receive a secret decoder ring with the secrets of how to beat VCU and Saint Louis. But what is guaranteed is the four years preceding are the gift of the principles and ethos of a Franciscan blueprint. As well as the knowledge that no task ever seemed too great when an old-school work ethic was in the room.
 
This is MacDonald's team now, his future. He walks where Donovan and Weise walked, where Satalin and Baron walked. He works for a man, Bob Beretta, who graduated a year ahead of him at St. Bonaventure and will work closely with another, Adrian Wojnarowski, who graduated three years after him.
 
"The only thing ever achieved in life without effort," St. Francis of Assissi once said, "is failure."
 
As basketball mottos go, when the goal is to reclaim and renew a tradition that extends to the Truman Administration … that's not a bad one to choose, actually.