When the team bus lurched to a halt around 9:15 p.m. Friday, Brian Baudinet, the player development coach of the Duquesne men’s basketball team, assumed that an accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike had caused the disruption.

But by Saturday night, more than 22 hours later, the bus — carrying 31 players, coaches, managers and members of the support staff — had not moved an inch. It was stranded, along with dozens of other buses, trucks and motor vehicles, on a snowy stretch of highway in the Allegheny Mountains in southwest Pennsylvania.

It wasn’t until 7:45 p.m. Saturday that players, using pizza boxes and garbage cans as shovels, were able to dig the bus out of the snow and begin heading back to Pittsburgh.

"We could sense the end was in sight," Baudinet said in a text. "So everybody was like let’s go.

Impenetrable road conditions caused by a winter storm that buried parts of the East Coast had forced the logjam. By noon Saturday, food and drink were growing scarce.