One Final March for Campbell

A confession of sorts: About two weeks ago, when George Mason was reeling and it was time to stop believin', I had planned to drive out to Fairfax and see Folarin Campbell before his team was eliminated in its conference tournament. Before his last game, I wanted to ask the senior guard if he felt like a disposable hero, what it felt like to have one month of his life in 2006 -- one perfect shot he made two years ago -- define the rest of his basketball existence.

The sequence still is vivid, a step-back, fadeaway jumper along the right baseline over the outstretched fingertips of Connecticut's Rudy Gay, who that June would be a first-round NBA draft choice. In the waning moments of overtime at Verizon Center, in a region final in which George Mason was supposed to finally morph into a pumpkin, that high-arcing rainbow swished through.

Down went U-Conn. and all the power and prestige it stood for in major college basketball. To the Final Four strode a smiling, laughing lot of kids no big school seemed to want, the first program of its kind to advance that far since Pennsylvania and Indiana State joined the party in 1979.

"I've never actually put the game on to watch the shot myself, but I've seen it on TV," Campbell said Tuesday afternoon. "I mean, that's probably the best shot I've shot."

He rocked back in his seat at Patriot Center, rubbed his goatee and smiled.

"It was a great shot," he added. "But, you know, I think I can make some more big ones this week. I hope to."

This is where the "Whatever Happened to Folarin Campbell?" story forks, where he and his teammates refused to let old memories get in the way of new frontiers.

With stingy defense and clutch shots from Campbell and Will Thomas, his rubber-band-man senior sidekick in the post, the Patriots won the Colonial Athletic Association tournament to secure an automatic bid to the real step show. In the process, they rebooted Mason Nation. Tonight, they face a group of brutish, three-point bombers from Notre Dame in Denver. Undersize in March as usual, their No. 12 seeding indicative of what kind of shot Mason is supposed to have of upsetting a member of the Big East elite, they're back, with much of their senior floor leader's tale still to tell.

Campbell never disappeared. He studied hard to ensure his communications degree this May, continued dating his high school sweetheart from Silver Spring, lost a heartbreaking CAA final to Virginia Commonwealth a year ago -- a crushing loss that made him realize how much he missed the tournament -- and earlier this year emerged from the other side of a family situation that almost undermined his senior season.

The situation slobbers, is cuddly and has a name: Cade, as in Folarin Cade Campbell. He is the large-and-in-charge, 24-pound, 8-month-old son belonging to Campbell and Sherryta Stokes, a Manhattan College volleyball player who managed to honor her scholarship last August despite giving birth July 16. Cade "just happened, but we're glad he did," Campbell said, while acknowledging how much the child, whom Sherryta's parents care for while their daughter is away at college, came to dominate his life.

"He was just so tired driving back and forth," Stokes said by telephone yesterday. "He kept saying, 'I want to see my boy, I want to spend time with him.' But he wasn't playing very well. I told him he's not going to remember everything at this age, so you need to handle your business right now. It was hard, because I know how much he wanted to see him."

Campbell added: "My focus was more on him than basketball, which was fine. But I just wasn't concentratin'. Beginning of the season, I would drive home after practice. I finally sat down and talked with her parents and my parents. And they just kind of told me: 'Focus on the game, focus on this season. We're going to take care of him and he'll be fine.'