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“How long did it take me to get over it?” Massimino says.

The McLain story would scar him terribly. Carlesimo, who was then the head coach at Seton Hall-and insisting that success hadn’t made him a different man. The coach, a round, cartoonish man with a special gift for building team chemistry and employing zone defenses to confuse opponents, would leave Villanova seven years later and spend the rest of his coaching career simultaneously chasing the standard his Wildcats set in Lexington-“As close to the perfect game as any team, ever,” says San Antonio Spurs assistant P.J. McLain vaguely implicated his teammates with broad generalizations and also implied that Massimino did little to stem his drug abuse.

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Their bond was tested and their cherished memory dented two years after winning the title when Gary McLain, the relentless cherub they all called Giz (short for Gizmo, a wide-eyed character from the 1984 movie Gremlins), the point guard who played 40 minutes against Georgetown’s suffocating pressure and committed only two turnovers, wrote an 18-page, first-person story in Sports Illustrated detailing his cocaine use during the championship season. They called the scrimmage “the Brothers versus the Joeys,” and not for the first time. Villanova elected to make it black players versus white players, seven-on-seven. It was like we were in 1985 all over again.”) On the day before his team beat Memphis State in the Final Four semifinals, Villanova coach Rollie Massimino allowed the players to choose sides for a public workout at a nearly packed Rupp Arena. Massimino calls it “one of the most memorable experiences my wife and I will ever have.” Harold Pressley, a starting forward on the championship team, says, “From the time I got off the plane until the time I got back on, it was nonstop laughs. All but two players and every coach and manager were present. Last November Villanova’s basketball team hosted Northwood University, where ’85 head coach Rollie Massimino is the 80-year-old head coach, and turned the weekend into a celebration of the ’85 team’s 30-year anniversary. They were an unusually close group of players and resistant to common obstacles. Pinckney pulled it out of his desk drawer recently, held it up for a visitor and shook his head in disbelief. (Pinckney stayed at Villanova until 2007, spent three seasons as an assistant coach with the Minnesota Timberwolves and since 2010 has been an assistant with the Chicago Bulls.) Not a day passes when somebody doesn’t ask him about 1985, and just last month a security guard gave him a yellowed copy of the Philadelphia Daily News from April 2, 1985.

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The championship elevated spidery 6'9 1/2' center Ed Pinckney to the 10th pick in the NBA draft, launched a workmanlike 12-year professional career and eventually steered him back to Villanova, where he is now a first-year assistant coach under Jay Wright. “I’ve had some challenges, some health challenges, not life-threatening, but difficult times in my life,” he says, “And I called upon the perseverance I learned back in that season.”)

“It taught me to believe in myself, and I’ve taken that through my whole life.” (Jensen stands by that, 11 years later. Four years later, at the age of 24, Jensen and a partner started Showtime Enterprises, a marketing company that now employs 125 people in six offices (Showtime was subsequently acquired by Sparks Marketing Group, for which Jensen is an Executive Vice President.) “That season, that tournament was a turning point in my life beyond the sport,” says Jensen. Harold Jensen, a sophomore head case recruited from Trumbull (Conn.) High to shoot from the outside, conquered his self-doubt only during the tournament run and made the most important shot in Villanova history, an 18-foot jumper that gave the Wildcats a 55-54 lead with 2:37 to play in the title game, a lead they did not relinquish. “Just talking about it, right now, the hair is standing up on the back of my neck,” says Wyatt Maker, a reserve sophomore center on the championship team, who sat on the bench during the title game, clutching the hand of junior teammate Chuck Everson, twin seven-footers willing balls into the basket like schoolgirl cheerleaders.

1 seed, yet lost to North Carolina State in their second tournament game.) The memory of the game moves many of the 85s to the edge of tears. The 14 Villanova players who dressed in blue that night in Lexington, Ky., are immortalized in a 150-foot-long mural just inside the main entrance to The Pavilion, where present-day Wildcats play their home games and are measured against the images in tight shorts on the wall, usually falling short (including this year's edition of the Wildcats, who were awarded a No.