“People I haven’t talked to in years were texting me, ‘Hey, I still have your number from school,’ ” Seidel said in a phone interview late Friday night. “ ‘I know we only hung out a few times, but oh my God, you’re killing it on Twitter.’ ”

There were even messages from former U.M.B.C. players whom Seidel had been invisible to when they were students. The account went from having about 5,400 followers to more than 41,000 by the time the sports world’s convulsions ended. Seidel’s posts were retweeted more than 48,000 times — many times with a check-this-out tone.

Seidel said he didn’t have a content plan going into the game. During most men’s basketball games, he is out in the broadcast truck doing replays or calling the game. His boss, Steve Levy, usually live tweets the men’s basketball games.

Seidel knew that one of the highest trafficked tweets he’d sent out from the account was when the men’s basketball team beat Vermont and he tweeted a screenshot of ESPN predicting U.M.B.C. had an 8 percent change of winning, captioned, “sup?”