In her first 99 years, Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt had built womens sports programs before it was common, participated in civil rights activism before it was popular and mentored thousands of students over several decades at Loyola Chicago.
All that to say, the true impact of her lifes work dwarfed her role as the team chaplain and mascot for Loyola Chicagos longshot run to the 2018 Final Four.
But for those three surreal weeks that spring, when they wheeled Sister Jean out of the tunnel to celebrate four straight improbable NCAA tournament victories, it produced the kind of March magic only one sport in the world can offer.
Sister Jean died at age 106, the school announced late Thursday night, and the coming tributes to her will no doubt reach a wide spectrum of people at Loyola and across Chicago whose lives she changed in ways that have nothing to do with basketball.
Realistically, though, most of us wouldnt have known anything about Sister Jean had Loyola guard Clayton Custers off-balance 15-foot jump shot not gotten a lucky bounce off the window with 3.6 seconds left to upset Tennessee, 63-62, in the round of 64.
That was the beginning of a phenomenon nobody could have expected. But thats also the NCAA tournament.
As Sister Jean leaves us, lets try our best not to mess it up.
Sister Jean was 43 years old when Loyola won the national championship in 1963 with a team that broke the so-called gentlemans agreement among coaches not to play more than two Black players at a time.
Over the rest of her long life, she saw programs like Loyola get pushed more to the fringes of college sports as it became a multi-billion dollar industry centered around football, which the school discontinued in 1930.
But the NCAA tournament has always had a place for the Loyolas of the world and characters like Sister Jean, whose mere association with a team going on an improbable run gives the event a unique richness that you cant script and could never predict.
In nearly 20 years of covering Final Fours, there is only one press conference that was crammed so full of reporters you couldnt even find a seat: When it was time to wheel Sister Jean up the ramp theyd constructed just for her to reach the dais, everyone wanted to listen.
It looked like Tom Brady at the Super Bowl, Loyola coach Porter Moser joked.
No event but the NCAA tournament can do that. Thats what makes it beloved, special and enduring.
And yet, there are undeniably forces within college athletics that want to strip it for parts and make it look like every other big corporate sporting event. They have little use for mid-major schools like Loyola, dont care about the cultural capital of stories like Sister Jean and only see March Madness through the lens of how many bids their mega-conferences can have gifted to their mediocre teams.
In fact, just a few hours before the news of Sister Jeans death became public, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti told reporters that he preferred an expanded NCAA tournament with a straight seeding format. That would mean most of the one-bid league champions, like Loyola in 2018, would play (and eliminate) each other in the opening rounds before the field is whittled down to the 64-team bracket that most people consider to be the real tournament.
Can you imagine anything so heinous, so disrespectful to the tradition of March Madness, than setting up a two-tiered NCAA tournament where the entire point is to eliminate as many potential Cinderellas as soon as possible so that the precious Big Ten and SEC teams dont have to face the indignity of an upset?
No thank you.
Petitti is a huge part of the problem here. He represents a new generation of administrator with few previous ties to college sport and no obvious love for the product but enormous power to shape its future. Petitti is the kind of person who thinks a check from private equity is a better association for college sports than a 99-year old nun in a wheelchair flicking confetti out of her hair.
Sorry Tony, but youre wrong.
Sister Jeans life should be a reminder to all of us that those positioned to move college sports into this era of professionalization need to do carefully, respectfully and with the utmost regard for what makes it great.
Its possible to do both if the powerbrokers want to.
Without the NCAA tournament giving schools like Loyola a fair shot, theres no Sister Jean story to captivate America and produce a once-in-a-lifetime run that well all remember forever.
College athletics can either decide to value that element of its marquee event or shove it to the side.
They should choose carefully and act as if Sister Jean will always be watching.