The little Catholic school in Worcester with no home gym, no basketball history, a part-time coach and a barn disguised as a practice court came out of nowhere to win it all 70 years ago.

You could say Holy Cross was the original bracket buster.

“Nobody had ever heard of us,” HC icon Bob Cousy said during a recent interview from his Florida home, “and we win this thing called the NCAA Championship.”

This year marks the platinum anniversary of Holy Cross’ 1947 title, which will always be one of the proudest moments in the college’s sports history. Emerging from what was just an eight-team field then, the Crusaders won three games in six days at Madison Square Garden, beating Navy, CCNY and, in the final on March 25, Oklahoma, behind George Kaftan’s team-high 18 points.

Kaftan, who was named MVP of the tournament, was carried off the court on his teammates’ shoulders. “H.C. Hoopmen Capture National Title, 58-47” was a front-page headline of the March 26 edition of the Worcester Telegram. The late, great Paul N. Johnson, former Telegram sports editor and Holy Cross beat writer, called the Crusaders the “Cinderella kids of college basketball” in his game account.

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“All these years what has stayed with me,” Kaftan said from his home in New Jersey, “is here was a team, Holy Cross, that won a national championship and we did not have a home court. Every game we played was an away game and then we managed to win a national championship. I think camaraderie had a big thing to do with it. We were a bunch of young kids and we wanted to prove something and all the pieces started to come together.”

Alvin “Doggie” Julian was the HC football team’s backfield coach, but had a basketball background and was offered $500 to add on the head hoops position in 1945.

The 1946-47 team was made up of mostly New York kids like Cousy, Kaftan, Dermie O’Connell, Frank Oftring, Ken Haggerty, Joe Mullaney and Bob McMullan. There was Charlie Bollinger of New Jersey, the two Worcester kids, Bob Curran and Andy Laska, as well as Jim Riley and Charlie Graver. It was a mix of World War II veterans and kids right out of high school.

Before the season, Haggerty, who co-captained the ’46-47 team with Mullaney, told Julian about a “hot shot” at his alma mater, Andrew Jackson High School in New York, that he might be interested in adding to the roster.

It was Cousy.

“I got this letter from Doggie,” Cousy said, ‘“Hey kid. I heard you’re a hot-shot basketball player. If you’re interested in a scholarship to Holy Cross, fill out this form. And that was the extent of it.”

Cousy was an All-City player his senior year of high school.

“Today if you’re All-City you’ve got 500 college coaches on your doorstep,” Cousy said. “Even then it was a big deal, so I was deluged with two college offers, from Holy Cross and Boston College.”

Boston College invited Cousy for a visit, which he took, but BC had no gym and, the real deal-breaker, no dorms, so he retrieved Julian’s letter and took him up on his offer. (Holy Cross had dorms).

“I showed up and a lot of us came in pretty much the same way,” Cousy said. “We ended up with 12, frankly, pretty good basketball players.”

Julian considered his team to have 10 starters, so he implemented his famous platoon system. Freshmen Cousy and Laska were backcourt mates on the second unit.

The Crusaders, who played their “home” games at Boston Garden and the old South High in Worcester, won their first four games of 1946-47, tripped through a three-game losing streak, then finished the year with 23 straight victories.

On the bench for most of that great streak was William “Rocks” Gallagher of Maynard, a graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind who earned an academic scholarship to Holy Cross. He accompanied classmate Haggerty to one of the games – a 58-49 win over Manhattan -- and Julian invited him to sit on the bench for the rest of the season. During games, Graver sat next to Gallagher, who came to be known as HC’s “good luck charm,” and gave him play-by-play of the action.

Holy Cross became the fifth New England team (following Springfield, Dartmouth, Tufts and Harvard) selected to the NCAA Tournament. Against Navy in the quarterfinals, the HC basketball program’s first national postseason game, Mullaney scored 18 points to lead a 55-47 victory.

HC fell behind to CCNY early, but Kaftan keyed a 13-2 run to put the Crusaders ahead by halftime. He scored 30 points in the 60-45 victory.

In the title game against Oklahoma, the 6-foot-3, 19-year-old Kaftan faced 6-foot-6, 26-year-old Sooners All-American and war hero Gerry Tucker for the opening tip.

“Here I am jumping center against Tucker,” Kaftan said, “and Tucker says to me, ‘So, you’re the young whipper-snapper everyone is talking about.’ I said, ‘Gerry, what are you doing here? This is a young man’s game.’ ”

Tucker scored 17 points to lead Oklahoma to a 31-28 halftime edge.

In the second half, Curran guarded Tucker and held him to one field goal. Oftring, whose grandson, Frank, was a member of Babson’s NCAA Division 3 title team this winter, and McMullan triggered a second-half run. O’Connell scored 16 points and the Crusaders thrilled the sellout crowd of 18,445, which included many family members and friends.

“I remember the excitement of New York City,” said Kaftan, who averaged 21 points in the three games. “Of course I was born and raised in the city as were most of the kids on the Holy Cross team, so to play in New York was a big advantage for us and something we all dreamed of as young kids.”

Back in Worcester, HC’s fans, who listened to the Crusaders’ NCAA exploits on the radio, welcomed home their heroes at a rally at Union Station.

“We win the damn tournament and the next thing you know we’re at Union Station and there are thousands of fans,” Cousy said, “and we’re all looking at each other saying, ‘What the hell did we do?’

“The magnitude of it was lost on the players,” Cousy said.

Soon enough, though, the Crusaders did realize the significance of their achievement.

“I think it’s fair to say, and I’m proud of it until this day,” Cousy said, “all of us who were part of that played a part in igniting the basketball flame in New England. Now, of course, basketball is humongous and it’s reached dimensions I never thought it would reach, but as far as New England, I think that really sparked basketball activity here.”

Added Kaftan, “New England at that time was strictly hockey and football. All of a sudden, we come along and we started to win games and we were responsible for advancing the basketball game in New England. When I first got there, we would travel around and you wouldn’t see any basketball hoops in the yards or the streets. By the time we became seniors, you would see kids playing basketball in the streets, kids playing basketball in the schoolyards.”

HC, which won the 1954 NIT title, was the only New England school to win a men’s basketball NCAA Tournament championship until UConn won the crown in 1999. The 1947-48 HC team advanced to the national semifinals.

Cousy, 88, Kaftan, 89, and Laska, 91, are the living members of HC’s 1947 team.

Cousy, who will return to his Salisbury Street home later this month, went on to win six NBA championships with the Boston Celtics, and is forever a Worcester idol. Nine years ago, Holy Cross erected a bronze statue of Cousy in front of the Hart Center. The statue is in safe keeping for now while the expansion and renovation of the Hart Center continues.

Cousy hasn’t been to Holy Cross in recent years, but last fall he hosted HC’s men’s and women’s basketball teams, along with special guests Togo Palazzi and Ron Perry Sr., both members of the ’54 team, Rev. Earle Markey, captain of the ’53 team, and the “Voice of the Crusaders,” Bob Fouracre, who suggested the get-together, at his home.

Cousy has been watching this year’s NCAA Tournament games and keeping close tabs on the five finalists for the 2017 Bob Cousy Award presented by the College of the Holy Cross (for the nation’s top point guard) – Nigel Williams-Goss of Gonzaga, Frank Mason of Kansas, Joel Berry II of North Carolina, Lonzo Ball of UCLA and Jalen Brunson of Villanova.

When home in Worcester, Cousy regularly visits Laska, who was a legendary and highly-respected coach and athletic director at Assumption College, where the gym is named in his honor. His daughter, Diane Laska-Nixon, said he enjoys visits with friends like Cousy and Dee Rowe, and his former players like Don Lemenager and Ted Paulauskas, and he, too, has watched all of this year’s NCAA games.

After starring at North High, Laska served for three years in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, then returned home and enrolled at Holy Cross. Laska is a member of the Holy Cross and Assumption halls of fame.

When the NCAA celebrated 75 years of the NCAA Tournament in 2012, Kaftan was named to the All-Time March Madness team. The 1946-47 Crusaders ranked among the top 25 March Madness teams.

Kaftan, who enjoyed a career as a dentist, has been married to his lovely wife, Helen, for 62 years. He was last at Holy Cross in 2013 when the Varsity Club presented him with a plaque to commemorate the NCAA 75-year honor. The Kaftans have maintained strong ties to the school – their daughter, Georgette, and granddaughter, Natasha Giftos, are both HC graduates.

Kaftan and Cousy were at the Hart Center for a memorable day in 2008 when their jerseys were raised to the building’s rafters. They talk on occasion and Kaftan said Rev. Markey comes to visit him and Helen in the summer.

This, though, seems to be one of Kaftan’s favorite times of the year.

“All of my friends around here, we’re excited to watch the NCAA Tournament and relive the past,” Kaftan said. “March Madness is the best sports show on television. I can’t believe how far this thing has gone. The beauty of it is they start with 68 teams and to have 68 teams they have to go into every nook and cranny of the United States and take these schools no one has ever heard of before. These are the schools that every once in a while break out and generate some excitement, and then the whole country becomes involved.”