The Bear essentials

 I'm trying to bring it back now, the first time I met the man. But it's too far away, and too many other memories have intervened between then and now, and so all that come are flashes: A cold blue sky, a spare pressbox, orange helmets and white jerseys and a huddled figure on the sideline who was all of  27 or so, but who somehow even then seemed much older.

Which is to say, 40 years is a long damn time.

But I'm compelled to cast back, now that Kevin Donley is a white-haired grandfather who has long grown beyond the huddled figure watching his Anderson College Ravens whirl the football up and down the field against Defiance or Bluffton or Findlay, that rugged old nemesis.  Anderson is where all this started for him, and I was lucky enough to be at the christening. He was a young coach just starting out and I was a young sportswriter just starting out, and if the latter suspected  the former might be going places, it was beyond my poor powers as a seer to envision just how exalted those places would become.

I mean, we're using "Kevin Donley" and "Bear Bryant" in the same sentence now. And "Kevin Donley" comes first.

On a cool blue autumn day down in Upland, In., the program Donley built literally from the mud up beat Taylor 40-20, and the man everyone calls Coach D crossed another Rubicon. This time it was, yes, Bear Bryant; with his 324th career victory, Kevin Donley passed the Bear into seventh place on the all-time list in all divisions of college football. Fifteen more victories -- less than two seasons as things usually go for Donley's Saint Francis Cougars -- and he'll be fifth all-time. Only John Gagliardi, Joe Paterno, Eddie Robinson and Bobby Bowden will be ahead of him.

So it is some fast company he is keeping, and thus I strain to remember more than I do. It is impossible, of course, as impossible as it likely was to envision what Gagliardi or Paterno or Robinson or Bowden would become when they were 27-years-old and just starting out. All I remember is the man had a genius even then for designing ways to find the end zone, and the Ravens won because of it.

And so on Donley moved on, eventually. And 20 years later, with a national championship on his resume now, he showed up in Fort Wayne to do what he'd always wanted to do: Start a football program from scratch that would not just win, but win the right way.

That process, I remember very well. I remember what the ground floor looked like, and how it was frequently mud lasagna on Saturday afternoons, and how the Cougars consequently brought a lot of their home field into the locker room with them after another disheartening loss. Their practice field that first year was a vacant lot that was as scruffy and un-manicured as a vacant lot tends to be. They park cars there now on game days.

And Donley?

I never saw him lose his cool once, that entire dreary season. They went 2-8 and got their heads beat in week after week, and week after week Donley would come into the postgame, plop himself down and remind us, in that maddeningly soft voice, that this first season was a learning process. And, boy, his young Cougars were learnin' lots.

One year later, still young, they went 8-3 and won the conference title, on the road, at Walsh. They never won fewer than nine games for the next decade, won 10 or more in nine of those years, and the Ws started to pile up. And pretty soon we were using Kevin Donley's name in the same sentence as Pop Warner's, the same sentence as the Bear's himself.

And yet I could walk into his office tomorrow, and sit down, and he would be the same Kevin Donley I've always known. He would be the same Kevin Donley who stood down there on those cold blue afternoons watching his Ravens trade haymakers with Defiance or Bluffton or the bleeping Findlay Oilers.

You know how I know that?

Because Saturday afternoon, after win No. 324, the Cougars team captain, Piercen Harnish, presented Donley with the game ball.

Donley thanked him. Then he told him to put it back in the bag, because, hey, those footballs ain't cheap.

Maybe some daring soul will fish it back out, paint the number 324 on it, and sneak it onto the shelf in his office when he's not looking. It would only be right.