Waking up on Monday morning in a Yankee Trails bus with nearly 50 other unwashed humans with unbrushed teeth and one unhappy bus driver wasn’t how this trip was supposed to go.

Monday morning was supposed to be one last huzzah through warm, sunny Houston and a fervent preparation for college basketball’s last game of the season. It was supposed to be a karmic reward for believing in Syracuse’s miracle season, investing so much time into being there.

But there’d be no NRG Stadium. No free ticket to the school’s potential second national championship. No envy from friends.

Instead, a McDonald’s parking lot. Rural Ohio. Light snow.

Yet no one seemed devastated, or even disgruntled. Sure, disappointment at not achieving the goal of making it to Monday night, but the fans on the bus seemed content. Or maybe comatose. A lot of people had brought NyQuil.

The Final Four fan bus, dispatched to Houston on Thursday at 8 p.m. was on its return voyage after No. 10 seed Syracuse’s season-ending loss to top-seeded North Carolina on Saturday night. By the time the bus unloaded back at Syracuse campus around 5:30 p.m. on Monday, the students had spent 67 of the last 94 hours on a bus. They’d traveled more than 3,264 miles and slept three of the last four nights upright in a cramped bus seat that made your neck sore for hours after waking up.

A few of the bus’ occupants had stayed behind, bought return plane tickets to stay for an extra concert or simply because they didn’t want to drive again. Those people, the riders in the back of the bus justified, were missing out on a part of the experience.

And even though Syracuse had lost, the experience is all the students had left to cling to. To be able to say they did this crazy thing, the spectacle in retrospect, was the only advantage left. The possibility of telling a friend or child years later. That may be why the atmosphere of the bus was neither somber nor agitated.

People cheered when word spread throughout the bus that the Syracuse women’s basketball team earned a spot in the national championship. They cheered again when the bus stopped at Panera for lunch the next day, only slightly softer.

But those two spurts aside, people generally kept their headphones on and their voices low, calmly waiting for the ride to just be over.

Someone remarked that they’d never considered six hours left in a trip “the home stretch.” Two seniors, one of whom had gone to Atlanta to see Syracuse in the 2013 Final Four, considered what it’d mean when the bus stopped. The last Syracuse basketball adventure of their lives as students would be over.

Was it crazy, one said, to wish a 67-hour bus ride might last a little longer?

As the bus rolled up in front of Schine Student Center only two girls, the same sorority girls who slept on their Otto the Orange pillow pets the first day, tried to coax the bus into a clap. Only one rider joined them.

It was like super-condensed summer camp. Unlikely friendships formed, bonding over the strange, shared struggle. There were the usual promises to meet up again, the ones often made but seldom kept. Many talked of a shower.

Some students stepped off the bus in clothing suited for Houston, not Syracuse. Someone joked that they were back in time to watch the national championship game later that night. It didn’t get a laugh.

The weather, which had been unseasonably warm throughout Syracuse’s run, had returned to snow by the time loss had frozen and students stepped off the bus. But those students carried a little bit of Houston warmth with them as they walked home through the cold.

Published on April 4, 2016 at 11:11 pm

Contact Sam: sjfortie@syr.edu | @Sam4TR