Every winter Wednesday night in late 1970s Burlington, Vermont, a small group of men met at the gym behind St Anthony’s Catholic Church to play basketball. They huddled against the cold in work boots, sweaters and jackets and were relieved when the most enthusiastic of them arrived with the key he had secured from the church office.

Inside, they quickly changed into gym shorts and T-shirts, careful to keep snow off the tile floor that made up the court. There were almost always 12 to 15 of them, most in their mid-to-late 30s – men with college degrees still unsure of their position in life, clinging to youth as responsibility approached. Among them were several woodworkers, a teacher, a college professor, an aspiring filmmaker, a religious man, a car mechanic and a wild-haired film-strip maker from New York named Bernie Sanders.

All these years later they remember him well. He was not the best player but certainly not the worst, with a deadly set-shot, rugged elbows and a brusque, Brooklyn twang that echoed through the tiny gym every time he spoke.

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“Give me da bawwwwwwl!” shouts Clem Nilan, one of the game’s participants, doing his best impersonation of Sanders on the court.

They laugh when they watch him on the debates. For the Sanders everyone sees now speaking with his arms, flailing his hands and waggling an index finger is the same one they recall from those long ago Wednesdays angling stork-like for rebounds and barking for passes.

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“I remember all the mannerisms,” chuckles Rob Borger, one of the woodworkers.

Michelle Obama once famously had her brother Craig Robinson, a basketball coach, play with her future husband because there is something about the game that reveals the truth about the person. The facades built in daily life don’t always withstand the heat of competition. As they tire, a player’s real personality always takes over. They become the person that they really are. “Just from working my own guys out I can tell everything about each one of those players,” Robinson once told Esquire magazine.

So who was the real Bernie Sanders running around St Anthony’s gym in his late 30s? The one who would become mayor of Burlington, senator from Vermont and possibly president of the United States?

Here is what the men who played basketball with him said:

“He wasn’t very fast.”

“He was crafty.”

“He had good elbows.”

“From mid-range, 10-15 feet he could kill you.”

“He sort of liked to be in charge, so there’s really nothing different in that,” laughs David Sharpe, the auto mechanic who ran his own shop in those days and is now a Vermont state legislator. “He would direct traffic and tell us who was goofing off.”

Bernie Sanders from Brooklyn might not have been the best basketball player on Wednesday nights at St Anthony’s but he wasn’t shy. Looking back, the other players can see the politician even if they didn’t know he was going to become one. Injustices did not go overlooked. He wasn’t one to call many fouls but he couldn’t let a bad call go unchallenged.

“He could be argumentative about stuff,” Borger says.

“There were always one or two strong personalities in the game and he was one of them,” recalls Michael Lyman, another of the woodworkers. “He was a guy who was willing to stand up and be the voice.”

Borger says he found the gym, located at the corner of Flynn and Pine in a working-class neighborhood on the south side of town. It wasn’t a particularly nice facility, primarily used as an auditorium and gymnasium for the church’s elementary school. At one end of the court was a stage, above the other a balcony.

Because the gym was tiny, they split themselves into teams of four instead of the traditional five, matching players by size and skill. Sanders, whose office has listed him at 6ft, was pitted against some of the taller players like Lyman and Lars Larsen, both woodworkers from around the area. Players on the teams that weren’t on the floor waited on chairs next to the court or climbed up to the balcony to watch from up high.

And whenever they watched Sanders they saw one thing. His jump shot. “It wasn’t even a jump shot because he didn’t leave his feet when he shot it,” Nilan recalls.

“I remember that shot, it was all he had,” says Ken Russack, who later partnered with Nilan on a Burlington restaurant.

“He moved without the ball very well and got very open,” Nilan adds. “He wanted the ball and he would get the ball and hit that shot almost every time. You would say: ‘Don’t leave this guy open to shoot’ and then he’d get open. He was sneaky good like that.”

Last week, after he won the New Hampshire primary, Sanders shot baskets at a high school gym with his grandchildren. The video proved popular. There was Sanders the old man in a tie dribbling with the little kids and then throwing up a few two-handed bank shots. He looked awkward at 74 years old in his suit pants and dress shoes. But even in this setting you could see he knew what to do with a basketball.

His form was smooth, his release quick. And as those who had played with him watched on their televisions and computers they were jerked three decades into the past.

“There was that shot,” Nilan says.

Brian Doubleday is sure he’s the one who brought Sanders to the game. In the early 1970s he filmed commercials for the progressive Liberty Union Party for which Sanders was a perennial US Senate candidate. Though Sanders only earned a tiny sliver of the vote in each election, Doubleday believed in his message and he liked the man as well. Even in his late 30s, Sanders had the rugged savvy of a player raised on the streets of New York. Plus he talked about playing against Connie Hawkins, the great Brooklyn playground legend whose game never quite translated to the NBA.

“Bernie loved basketball,” Doubleday says.

He also knew how to battle on a basketball court. Aside from his jump shot the one thing people remember about his games were his elbows. They were bony and hard and hurt when they made contact with your ribs. And they seemed to find their way into the side of every player at one time or another.

“You didn’t want to run into Bernie because you would get an elbow,” Borger says. “Not intentional, but he would come down hard.”

Doubleday laughs as he recalls the players who, on occasion, found themselves knocked into the stage at one end of the court. More than a few of those, he says, may have been bumped there by Vermont’s future US senator. “He has long arms, I like to say he has ‘Kevin McHale arms,’” Doubleday says. “He would smack the ball away.”

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The Sanders who showed up at St Anthony’s fit in with the group. Several of the players describe him as “friendly.” They seemed to like him. But he had a serious side to him that many of them did not. While he liked basketball he never joined the regular conversations about the closest NBA team, the Boston Celtics. Nor does anyone remember him going out afterward for postgame beers as the others usually did.

He often came with Huck Gutman, a professor at the University of Vermont, who has remained one of his closest friends and political advisors. And it soon became clear to the group that he was very much moved by social issues. Topics like the inequity of wealth spilled into his conversations. “He never changed his tune,” Brian Doubleday says.

The other players did not object. Most of them considered themselves to be progressives, even if they didn’t actively follow the issues as much as Sanders or Gutman. Those who knew about his involvement with the Liberty Union Party sometimes teased him about the results of a recent senate election jokingly saying: “What, did you get 4% this time?”

Others had no idea he was a politician. Once Russack sat down beside Sanders between games and tried to spark a conversation. “So, Bernie, what do you do by the way?” he asked. All these years later, Russack laughs. “I really said that,” he says. “But he was always doing something in a non-traditional job environment. It was never working for The Man.”

Then in 1981 Sanders ran for mayor as a member of the Citizen’s Party. A few of the players worked on his campaign. A couple still have buttons from the election. No one expected him to win. The party was an obscure one and the roots of the democratic machine in Burlington went deep. The man he was campaigning against, Gordon Pacquette, had been elected five straight times. Sanders spent months railing about the ambitious plans of a local developer, painting Pacquette as the developer’s willful ally. And in a surprise, Sanders won the election.

By 10 votes.

When asked, half in jest, if the game’s 15 or so core players from the game at St Anthony’s gym provided the margin of victory for Sanders and are therefore responsible for him running for president today, Brian Doubleday pauses.

“I definitely agree,’ he finally says. “I bet there were 10 of us who lived within the city limits of Burlington. I can think of seven of them off the top of my head and we were all for Bernie. I can really see it.”

The 1981 mayoral race was big for Sanders. It gave him legitimacy. It took him from being an obscure candidate on Vermont’s fringe to national prominence as a socialist mayor in the early days of Ronald Reagan. Had he not beaten Pacquette and then won three more terms he probably wouldn’t have run for the state’s lone US house seat – which he won in 1990 – or been elected to the US senate in 2006. He certainly wouldn’t be beating Hillary Clinton in democratic primaries.

On the first Wednesday after Sanders beat Pacquette, the players cheered Sanders when he entered the gym. Then they went back to playing basketball. Soon after, Sanders stopped coming to the games. Being mayor of Burlington was too big a job, he didn’t have time for basketball. The game fell apart about a year after that. Life was intruding. Players get married, found new jobs and moved away. Responsibility beckoned. They didn’t have time for basketball either.

Moved by Sanders, Sharpe eventually started his own political career, winning a seat in Vermont’s house of representatives, where he is now one of the state’s strongest liberal voices. “I wasn’t involved in politics but he affected me,” Sharpe says.

Many of the group remain friends though several have left the state. Brian Doubleday has a production company in Denver, his brother, Dave, lives in Woodstock. Borger is in Florida. Lyman spends half his year in Florida as well. Oddly, the entire group is still alive – a statistical anomaly for a group of men in their late 60s and early 70s. Most of them also continued to play basketball somewhere, stretching their athletic lives for many more decades. Dave Doubleday, who is 75, played until tearing his achilles tendon last year. Sharp, 69, still plays in a 50-and-over game in Burlington. He is constantly begging an old political friend to join him when in town.

And then about three or four years ago the friend showed up. Bernie Sanders did not give notice he was coming, just like the old days. He simply appeared, standing on the side of the court in shorts and a t-shirt, all long arms and bony elbows.

“Come on Bernie, join us,” Sharp called.

So one last time, Bernie Sanders was together with him on a basketball court. It was only one game. Sharpe can’t remember any of the details. He can’t say if Sanders hit a jump shot or grabbed a rebound or used his elbows. All he recalls is how thrilled he was to watch Vermont’s senator jogging down the floor.

“It was a treat to see him,” Sharpe says.

The most memorable man from a long-forgotten Wednesday night basketball game.