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It was a trip back to the ‘90s last night for me. To a place I’ve not been in almost 30 years. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Paula Abdul had shown up.

I was at the Rutgers Athletic Center for a basketball game. But it was not at all like other trips I’ve made there the past 20 years or so. This was different. This was the RAC the way it used to be, in all its low-rent glory. We’re talking another decade back, to when Penn State had only been invited to the Big Ten but was not yet allowed to actually play in it, its club membership still being processed and accepted. This was when both teams played in the Atlantic 10.

That’s how it felt on Tuesday. The fans and the band supplying real organic noise, not some phony fabricated pumped-in soundtrack. The weird set up with two giant sets of stands on each side-court but then just the little ledge on one baseline and the student section raising hell on the other. There’s nothing like it. I practically shed a tear.

I had to call Bruce Parkhill at his snowbird home down in Naples just to reminisce about the old days of the A-10. Just as I’d done with Brian Allen in Piscataway on Tuesday night after Penn State’s 72-61 loss, Parkhill and I talked about that bitter last-minute defeat to Rutgers exactly 30 years ago this season in the conference championship game. About what a great atmosphere that dog-eared old place generates.

And then the 12-year PSU basketball coach (1983-95), the best the school has ever had, said something that made me think. He said he was on the road somewhere in 1993 during PSU’s first season in the Big Ten and was asked by a Midwesterner what he thought about how tough it must be to go on the road in all the massive Big Ten arenas with 5-figure crowds every date. And Parkhill’s response?

“I told him, ‘Heck, it was a lot tougher in the A-10. You kidding me, all those places we had to go to?’”

And of course, he was right. Going on the road to saltine boxes like McGonigle Hall at Temple and Curry-Hicks Cage at Massachusetts and Keaney Gym at Rhode Island and Hawk Hill at St. Joe’s and on and on. There wasn’t one super palace in the league. They were all dumps. Including, of course, Penn State’s Recreation Building, also known as Rec Hall.

That really completed a thought I’d had Tuesday night at the RAC: This entire Rutgers basketball renaissance is like a time travel to Penn State’s 1995 season. The similarities are scary.

You have an overachieving coach doing more with less (Steve Pikiell playing the part of Parkhill). You have the lovably ugly and hilariously outdated arena which is really more like an Indiana high school gym (the RAC playing the part of the Rec). You have a roster full of guys who, other than maybe two or three, no other contender in the league would want (Ron Harper Jr and Geo Baker in the roles of John Amaechi and Danny Earl… or Pete Lisicky). And the others just play harder and smarter than their pay grade.

Like Rutgers now, Penn State was just starting to get really competitive in 1995. The Lions began their third Big Ten season 4-2, shocking many just the way Rutgers’ 3-1 B1G start has stunned the conference this season. PSU finished 1995 at 17-10 and 9-9 in the league, just out of the NCAA money, much as I expect RU to end this year.

And almost exactly as a filled and rowdy RAC is blindsiding visitors this season, there was nothing to prepare first-time visitors to a sold-out Rec Hall, the way it was when the Lions finally got a Big Ten schedule in 1993. In both cases, there was no other building like it.

The sound waves had no space to dissipate, no place to rest. They just bounced back and forth and up and down. The crowd was right on top of you. As the smothering fans screamed at them with the venom of natives ready to light a sacrificial campfire, visiting Big Ten players wore bewildered looks, as if they couldn’t believe they let these guys and this building in the league.

Penn State guard Michael Jennings (00) shoots a free throw and Indiana's Damon Bailey (22) watches during the second overtime of the infamous 88-84 loss to #1 Indiana on Feb. 9, 1993 at Rec Hall in State College, Pa.

And Parkhill’s teams not only played with max effort just about every time out, they also outthought and out-crafted you. Which brings us to his Rutgers counterpart.

At the heart of it all is Pikiell. He’s the perfect counterpart to the RAC: Not sexy, just effective. He has that peculiar Connecticut accent and the face of a South Boston beat cop – not the mean one but the one who passes out candy to kids. Snappy press conference sales patter? It’s really not him. But he’s always happy to talk hoops. Y’know, about playing the game?

This is Pikiell’s fourth season in Piscataway after a decade toiling in noble obscurity in the America East Conference at tiny Stony Brook, halfway out Long Island Sound. As a player, he was the captain of the Connecticut team that broke through to national prominence in the early ’90s under a then little-known coach named Jim Calhoun.

What Pikiell found upon his arrival at RU was not fit to be called a D-I program, let alone a Big Ten one. It was the remains of a team buried under year upon year of neglect from Fred Hill to Mike Rice to, worst of all, Eddie Jordan. That final 1-17 RU outfit in 2016, saved from a winless league season only by a Senior Day home win over ragged Minnesota, is the most un-coached high-major team I’ve ever seen.

Pikiell tore the thing down to its foundation and slowly has built it back up into a team.

Make no mistake, without Baker (out for the month at least with a broken left thumb), it’s not a talented team. The Knights can’t hit anything beyond 10 feet. They are the least accurate 3-point shooting team in the Big Ten. They are 12th in free throw shooting.

But lay-ups and dunks? Those, they know how to make. They also know how to find them – by prying open space around the hoop, jumping first, jumping last and basically fighting for rebounds with the relentless fortitude of an immigrant laborer with a sledgehammer. As if they need the work.

Like I said, nothing sexy about it. It’s not pretty basketball. It’s the antithesis of your glamorous high-end athletes finishing with balletic grace. But Pikiell’s guys seized that game on Tuesday night with the same desperation that a quarter-century of Tom Izzo’s champions have. His most beloved Michigan State teams haven’t always been pleasing to the eye, either. They just want it more than everyone else.

Rutgers isn’t good enough to have everything it wants, yet. It might never be. There are no substantive plans for any palatial new arena. Pikiell will never fill a suit like Jay Wright. He won’t win the press conference like Bruce Pearl. He can’t hope to recruit like John Calipari. He’ll just figure out how to do more with less.

That’s what Rutgers basketball is doing. These days, it’s a rarity. And I don’t think it ever goes out of style.

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