On the evening of March 2, 1991, I was sitting with some family members and friends in the section of Saint Francis University’s Maurice Stokes Athletics Center now known as “Krimmel’s Korner.”

We were part of a crowd of 3,517 that jammed into the Stokes Center that night to see the Red Flash men’s basketball team defeat Fairleigh Dickinson, 97-82, in the 1991 Northeast Conference championship game.

I may have had an adult beverage that evening to celebrate Saint Francis’ first-ever NEC title. I don’t remember.

I did have an adult beverage — a limited-edition Coors Golden Banquet beer to be precise — this past Tuesday following SFU’s 46-43 victory over Central Connecticut State in the 2025 NEC championship.

With the win over the Blue Devils, the Flash extended their improbable late-season winning streak to six games and punched their ticket to the 2025 NCAA Tournament. Coach Rob Krimmel’s team will find out Sunday who it will face in next week’s March Madness tourney.

SFU closed the 2024-25 regular season with three straight overtime wins before posting three consecutive three-point victories in the NEC Tournament, culminating with the upset of top-seed CCSU in New Britain, Connecticut.

Back in Loretto, the Red Flash faithful began celebrating like it was 1991.

A little more than 34 years separated these two celebrations.

The 1991 team was led by two players — Joe Anderson and Mike Iuzzolino — whose names became household ones for diehard Red Flash fans three-and-a-half decades ago. Both players’ jerseys are on display in SFU’s locker room.

Iuzzolino was a homegrown talent who starred at Altoona Area High School. He played at Penn State for two years before finding his way to Loretto and then the NBA.

Anderson was a highly touted star football player from T.C. Williams High School in Virginia who wanted to play college basketball. By the time he graduated from Saint Francis, Smokin’ Joe had scored more than 2,300 points and surpassed Maurice Stokes as the school’s all-time leading scorer.

The 1991 team was led by a charismatic coach, Jim Baron, who is still revered by some Flash fans on Cresson mountain the same way that Nick Saban is down in Alabama.

The 1991 team became almost mythological in Loretto as the years passed, and its legend grew as the Flash struggled in the seasons that followed.

When Krimmel was elevated from assistant to head coach in 2012, SFU had recorded just five winning seasons in NEC action in the 21 years between 1991 and 2012.

While it didn’t happen overnight – in Krimmel’s first season at the helm, the Flash went 5-24 – the 2000 SFU grad eventually returned the program to solid footing.

He recruited several incredibly talented players — including one of SFU’s all-time greats in Keith Braxton — and the Flash made NEC title game appearances in 2017, 2019 and 2020. But the program came up short of a league crown in each of those years.

“When you get there three times, you start to wonder ‘when is it going to be our time?'” said Krimmel, who is in his 29th year at Saint Francis as a player (1996-2000), assistant coach (2000-12) and head coach (2012-present).

That time came last Tuesday night in what the SFU coach described as a “rock fight” at CCSU.

While it certainly wasn’t an offensive clinic — longtime sportswriter Bob Ryan texted me after the game and noted that “they won’t be mailing the game tape to Springfield” — SFU turned in a solid defensive effort.

The Flash also made just enough shots to bring the NEC trophy back to Loretto for the first time since the George H.W. Bush administration.

The stars on this NEC title team include a sharpshooting point guard from Australia (Riley Parker) and a box score-stuffing rookie from Dayton, Ohio (Juan Cranford). Parker was a first-team All-NEC performer. Cranford was voted the league’s Rookie-of-the-Year and named the NEC Tournament MVP.

These two guards and the other 18 members of the 2024-25 team join the 15 players on the 1990-91 team as Northeast Conference champions.

“The stories about the 1991 team helped because there was a standard,” said Krimmel. “They set the bar. I heard from a lot of the guys (after the win over CCSU) who were on that team and I told all of them that they set the standard for modern college basketball success at Saint Francis.”

Pat Farabaugh is a professor of communications at Saint Francis and the Red Flash men’s basketball team’s play-by-play man. He served as sports information director at the school from 1999-2005 and is the author of “An Unbreakable Bond: The Brotherhood of Maurice Stokes and Jack Twyman.”