By Alexander Wolff

Ten days after the upset, Lopes was still puffing with pride outside the Shack. Ken Sakamoto

RELATED • VIDEO: Rarely seen footage of Chaminade's amazing upset

A former Silversword turned Lopes on to the lunch-bucket forward Ernest Pettway, then haunting a rec center in Pasadena. "He didn't shoot very well, but at least I didn't have to tell him not to," his coach recalls. Lopes landed another starter literally at home. Guard Mark Rodrigues, Lopes's distant relative, starred at St. Louis High and, finding himself recruited by cousin Merv, concluded that "you can't say no to blood."

Then, on the eve of the 1982-83 season, Lopes fielded a call from an Air Force enlisted man on Oahu. The airman told him he had a 6' 8" brother who was out visiting. Tony Randolph stood closer to 6' 6", but fatefully hailed from Staunton, Va., the town just down the Shenandoah Valley from Harrisonburg, where Ralph Sampson grew up. Randolph had guarded Sampson in high school and played rec ball against him dozens of times. He had even gone out with Ralph's sister Valerie.

Lopes asked Randolph to jump into a workout. After he threw down a dunk from the wing during a 3-on-2 drill, Lopes says, "We enrolled him, and that was it."

"Most of the players on our team felt they were Division I caliber," says Haenisch, now a stockbroker living in Beverly Hills, Calif. "So every time we played a D-I opponent, it was a kind of vendetta. Every time, Tony Randolph would show."

For Virginia's part, its date with Chaminade fell in the midst of a December designed as a kind of valedictory tour for the Cavaliers' senior center. In the locker room after Alabama-Birmingham had eliminated Virginia from the NCAA tournament the previous March, athletic director Dick Schultz announced plans for a trip to Japan, with a Hawaiian stopover on the return -- surely a carrot to combat the NBA's hardship rule and lure Sampson back for one final season. On Dec. 11, at the Capital Centre in Landover, Md., Virginia defeated Georgetown and Hoyas sophomore Patrick Ewing in a made-for-Ted Turner event hyped as the Game of the Decade. Sampson scored 23 points, grabbed 16 rebounds and blocked seven shots even though he was sick and "played because he kind of had to," remembers Jim Miller, who played at forward alongside Sampson.

Right afterward the Cavaliers were to fly to Tokyo, by way of New York City and Anchorage, to participate in the Suntory Ball, a three-team tournament sponsored by a Japanese distillery. Organizers would pay Virginia a $50,000 appearance fee (more than twice Chaminade's annual basketball budget) and bill the Cavaliers' opening-round date with Houston and Akeem Olajuwon as another Georgetown game. But a blizzard delayed Virginia's departure. "By the time we got to Japan, we were basically hallucinating from sleep deprivation," remembers Virginia forward Tim Mullen. "Japanese people were walking up to all the black guys and saying, 'You Sampson?' "

Somewhere en route, bored in an airport between connecting flights, Miller and Mullen reached into the carry-on bag of Virginia broadcaster Mac McDonald and pulled out a tape recorder. They launched into mock play-by-play of the Game of the Decade on what they thought was a blank cassette. Only it wasn't blank. In what might have been a kind of inadvertent voodoo ritual, they recorded over much of the radio account of Sampson's extraordinary performance against Georgetown.

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