While baseball and football remain my favorite sports, there is no better sporting event overall than the college basketball playoffs known as March Madness.

Yes, the Super Bowl has become big enough for some to suggest that Americans have the next day off as a national holiday, but after several hours, the game is over, and it rarely lives up to its hype. Baseball’s World Series — like its regular-season and playoff games — has become a tiresome battle of wills between managers. Starting pitchers often don’t last into the fifth inning, no matter how well they pitch, and batters who hit hard smashes to either side of the infield are often retired harmlessly by the increasing use of defensive shifts. At this rate, that sport considered America’s national pastime will continue to lose fan support.

Meanwhile, despite a season abbreviated and disrupted by the pandemic, the NCAA managed to put together its field of 64 Division I basketball teams that have won most of their games this season, with the country divided into four regions, each with seeds 1-16.

At this time of year, I am always reminded of the tournament in 1973 when a young man who played locally led a small Catholic college team to national prominence in the NCAA’s storied Final Four.

Ernie DiGregorio probably didn’t even measure the six feet he was listed as in the Providence College Friars’ basketball program book. He was shorter than most other college players and not particularly fleet afoot by Division I collegiate standards. However, through sheer hard work during long hours of practice every single day year-round, Ernie D would become a veritable giant on the basketball court.

DiGregorio’s link to this area was his play at nearby St. Thomas More School, a Catholic college preparatory school on an idyllic 110-acre campus on the shore of Gardner Lake in the Oakdale section of Montville. St. Thomas More has a long, rich basketball tradition under long-time Coach Jere Quinn, and, before that, Norwich native Nick Macarchuk, who coached there from 1962-1973 before moving on to assist Coach Dave Gavitt at Providence. Macarchuk, who was honored in 1987 with the Norwich Rotary’s Native Son Award, then went on to serve as head coach at Division I Canisius, Fordham and Stony Brook. Among many other great players during Macarchuk’s successful tenure at St. Thomas More was former Norwich Free Academy star Cas Grygorcewicz and Cas’s Hartford-Weaver High School rival, Cleave Royster.

After leading St. Thomas More to one of its many New England championships, DiGregorio received more than 200 offers from all over the country to play Division I college basketball. Some, he would later admit, he didn’t even open because his mind was made up. He didn’t even visit any other college campus. He was going to play in his hometown for Providence College.

Now, I knew from having watched DiGregorio at St. Thomas More that he was a great player, but I wondered if he would be good enough to see much playing time at PC, where professional players like Lenny Wilkins, Johnny Egan, Jimmy Walker, John Thompson and Mike Riordan had graced the Alumni Hall basketball court. Looking back now, I’m embarrassed not to have known how great DiGregorio would become at Providence.

He was a three-year starter for Coach Gavitt, who would later be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

In his senior 1972-73 season, DiGregorio would become a first-team All American and lead the Friars to one of their best seasons, taking them all the way to the NCAA Final Four, where they would lose a heart-breaking game to Memphis State. The Friars were dominating the taller Memphis State team, but couldn’t keep up after star center and DiGregorio’s friend, Marvin Barnes, had to leave the game early with a knee injury.

Until that point, the Friars appeared on their way to a championship game showdown against legendary UCLA and its All-American three-time Player of the Year Bill Walton. DiGregorio averaged 24.5 points per game in his senior season, and that was before the three-point arc was in place.

As a great outside shooter, he likely would have averaged more than 30 points per game if three-point baskets had been part of the game then.

Having listened to me rave on and on about DiGregorio, my dad surprised me one day when he produced a pair of tickets he’d purchased for an upcoming Providence College game against cross-town rival Brown University. Dad wasn’t a big sports enthusiast, but even he had heard all the local talk about the great Ernie D. “Will this be much of a game?” he asked as we drove together to the Providence Civic Center on the evening of the game. No, I replied, it would likely be a blow-out, but I was sure to add how excited I was to be seeing the former local star in a PC uniform, lest Dad think I didn’t appreciate the gesture.

After Providence scored the game’s first basket with ease in the opening seconds, I told my dad that this would be how it would go that night. Then Brown scored ... and they scored again, and again, and again, and again until Gavitt called a timeout to settle down his players. Each time the underdog Brown team scored, my father would playfully elbow me, saying at one point: “You were right. This game is a blowout so far.”

I did not appreciate his humor. However, PC regrouped and eventually did win the game in a rout. At one point in the second half, the flashy DiGregorio, who was a ball-handling master, brought the capacity crowd to its feet with a perfect, behind-the-back, length-of-the-court pass to a teammate for an easy basket.

The game many Providence fans remember best is the Friars’ March 17, 1973, NCAA quarter-final match-up against the favored University of Maryland, which was led by three future NBA players, Len Elmore, Tom McMillen and John Lucas, and coached by another future Hall of Famer, Lefty Driesell.

Claiming he had trouble pronouncing it, the colorful and bombastic Driesell either couldn’t or wouldn’t refer to DiGregorio by name, instead referring to him only by his number, No. 15. His strategy, he said before the game, would be to “give ‘No. 15’ his 20 points,” and try to shut down Barnes and the rest of the Providence team.

The Providence/Maryland game was broadcast nationally on NBC with play-by-play delivered by the iconic sportscaster, Curt Gowdy. The game exceeded even the highest expectations, with Gowdy proclaiming the first 20 minutes the best half of college basketball he had ever seen.

The favored Terrapins led the Friars, 51-50, at the end of a run-and-gun first half. DiGregorio was unstoppable, with Gowdy practically shouting into the microphone after DiGregorio had scored 20 of his 24 first-half points that “Lefty Driesell said he’d give DiGregorio his 20 points, but he didn’t say he was going to give them all to him in the first half!”

Despite his stellar play, DiGregorio would foul out of the game with more than 11 minutes left. Nevertheless, Barnes, DiGregorio’s backcourt mate, Kevin Stacom, and reserve Nehru King picked up the slack, and PC would run away with a 103-89 win.

In only 27 minutes of play, DiGregorio had scored 30 points and dished out five assists.

“Do you think,” he said after the game, “that Driesell knows how to pronounce my name now?”

The former St. Thomas More standout would be drafted in the first round later that year by both the Buffalo Braves of the National Basketball Association and the rival American Basketball Association’s Kentucky Colonels. DiGregorio, the Braves’ No. 1 pick, went into the more established NBA, where he was named Rookie of the Year in 1974 after leading the league in assists and free throw percentage and averaging 15.2 points per game. Slowed by injuries later, he would play only until 1978 for the Braves, Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics, but he finished his career with nearly 3,000 points and an average of more than five assists per game.

Years later, DiGregorio would be hired as an ambassador by Foxwoods Resort Casino, joining other sports stars like retired Boston Red Sox baseball pitcher Luis Tiant and former boxing champion Vinny Pazienza. I had a chance to chat with DiGregorio before a Mashantucket Pequot golf tournament a few years ago, and we reminisced about a career that earned him induction to the College Basketball Hall of Fame.

“Yeah, that was a good one,” he recalled of the Maryland game.

Did he believe Driesell knew his name after the game?

“Oh, I think so,” he said with a wink and a smile.