Pat McKenzie Sr. was stuck on a frozen bus on an icy stretch of North Dakota freeway - wishing he and his teammates could get home to Saint John's while hoping this wasn't an omen of things to come.
McKenzie and the rest of the 1978-79 Johnnie basketball team had just dropped their season opener 81-68 on the road on a frigid late November night at Jamestown (ND).
Now the ride home was slipping into 11 hours of frigid purgatory.
"Our team bus blew a clutch or something a short distance out of Jamestown," legendary SJU head coach Jim Smith recounted in the St. Cloud Times the following day. "We caught a ride into Valley City and got another bus, but that one barely reached Fargo before the radiator froze up. We ordered another bus in Fargo, but the driver misunderstood our request.
"We waited about two hours for him at a restaurant, then ordered another bus. That one got us home."
McKenzie - then the senior starting point guard - remembers the sub-zero journey vividly.
"We were stuck on that bus, then we finally got to a gas station and they were out of candy bars and everything else we wanted," recalls McKenzie, who has gone on to a long career as the team physician for the NFL's Green Bay Packers, and whose son Pat Jr. also played for the Johnnies and is now the team's head coach.
"It was like it just fit. The trip back was a mess and so was the start to our season."
Things didn't get much better for SJU on the road at Minnesota-Morris a few nights later when Rodney Oliver drained an 18-foot jumper with just more than a minute remaining to lift the Cougars past the Johnnies 42-41.
Suddenly, a veteran-laden team with sky-high expectations was 0-2. Yet no one lost hope.
"I think we knew the pieces of the puzzle were there," said superstar center Frank Wachlarowicz, another one of the seven seniors who returned that season and the only SJU player to be a two-time All-American.
"It was just a matter of time before they started falling into place. Starting 0-2 was frustrating, but no one hit the panic button. We knew what we were capable of."
"That start was an eye-opener for us," added fellow senior Ted Nowak, who joined Wachlarowicz in the post on a team that had won the conference title the year before and had advanced to the NAIA national tournament in each of the past three seasons.
"It showed we couldn't afford to live in the past. This was a new season and we had to take every game seriously. In the end, I think it was a good experience for us. It probably served us well the rest of the way."
That's a hard point to argue with, especially since after the first two games, everything started going the Johnnies' way. The team rattled off a school-record 27 straight wins, including an 18-0 MIAC record in which they won 13 games by 10 or more points.
"That team had everything," Smith recalls. "Obviously, Frank was outstanding the post. But Ted Nowak was a great player too. Pat McKenzie was such a great guard. Dan Smith and John Patterson at the wings were very athletic and smart. We had a lot of talent coming off the bench. Everyone fit in so well with everybody else."
"Everybody knew what their role was," Wachlarowicz added. "Everyone knew where they were supposed to be at all times. Most teams need to take timeouts when they changed defenses. We did that on the fly most of the time. We might be playing a 3-2 zone, then the next time down the court, we were in man-to-man. Then we'd be back in a 2-3 zone. It threw other teams off that we could switch up so quickly."
SJU rolled past Moorhead State 86-61 in the NAIA District 13 semifinals at Warner Palaestra, led by 14 points off the bench from John Eisenschenk. That set up a showdown at Northern Intercollegiate Conference champion Mankato State in the district final.
In that game, before a packed house of more than 6,000 at Highland Arena, the Johnnies trailed almost the entire way. But a pair of free throws by Dan Smith tied the game at 71 with 37 seconds remaining in regulation. SJU then hit 11 of 12 free throws in overtime to emerge with an 84-82 victory.
"Everybody still remembers the Mankato State game," said Wachlarowicz, who became the leading scorer at any level in Minnesota college basketball history that night, a record that stood until it was broken by St. Cloud State guard Gage Davis in 2019.
"Connie O (Connie Overboe), who did play-by-play for all our games on the radio, said it was one of the greatest basketball games he ever witnessed. And he'd called a lot of Big Ten games and other college matchups.
"There were just so many momentum swings. It was an amazing game to be a part of."
The win again propelled SJU into the 32-team NAIA national tournament at Kemper Arena in Kansas City, where the Johnnies beat West Virginia Wesleyan 83-81 in the first round. But in the second, they fell 79-75 to Southwest Texas State despite shooting 55.8 percent from the field. Wachlarowicz finished with 25 points, but he and fellow seniors Dan Smith and Nowak fouled out in the second half – ending their careers on the bench.
"I fully expected us to go much further than we did," Nowak said. "We were such a good team with such high expectations, and it was disappointing to lose that game the way we did. But, the way college basketball works, there's a very good chance you're going to lose your final game. That's just the nature of the way the sport is set up.
"Still, no one wants to go out that way in the last game of your collegiate career. We lost to a very good team, but it was still a hard one to digest."
Yet the loss did nothing to diminish everything the Johnnies accomplished. Jim Smith - who retired in 2015, but remains the winningest coach at any level in Minnesota college basketball history - was named NAIA District 13 coach of the year.
Wachlarowicz earned all-conference and all-district honors for the fourth consecutive season. Dan Smith and McKenzie joined Wachlarowicz (MIAC player of the year) on the all-conference first team while Nowak and senior John Patterson earned honorable-mention distinction.
"They were such a fun team to coach," Jim Smith said. "You knew we were always going to be in the ballgame, no matter who we were playing against. We just had so much talent.
"But more than that, they were just a great group of guys to work with and coach."
"The guys on that team played together so long that we established bonds that have lasted a lifetime," McKenzie said. "Those are still some of my best friends in the whole world."
