It was a good-news, bad-news situation for former NC State point guard and head basketball coach Sidney Lowe.

The Detroit Pistons assistant coach knew if his team beat the New York Knicks Wednesday night, they would clinch the Eastern Conference’s final spot in the NBA playoffs. The Pistons won 115-89, earning the right to play Milwaukee in a seven-game series that starts Sunday.

But Lowe also knew that if the Pistons won, he would be unlikely to make it to Raleigh this weekend for the NC State Athletic Hall of Fame celebration, in which the ’83 Cardiac Pack will become the second team inducted into the exclusive group. Individuals in this year’s class include former athletics director Willis Casey, men’s basketball all-time leading scorer Rodney Monroe, women’s basketball star Trudi Lacey, former NCAA and Olympic gold-medal winning swimmer Cullen Jones and retired PGA Tour standout Tim Clark.

“It’s very disappointing, because I was looking forward to being there,” Lowe says. “I was hoping to be able to make it work, but we have practice here in Detroit Saturday, coaches meetings, travel to Milwaukee and we have the game on Sunday. We just couldn’t get the details to work.

“But I have been texting and talking to the rest of the team to tell them how much I want to be there.”

Lowe, an All-ACC point guard, was the team’s field general, the Everett Case Award winner as the ACC Tournament’s most valuable player and the guy who hit three jump shots in the second half of the NCAA title game to keep his team close to top-ranked Houston.

He returned to NC State from 2006-2011 as head coach of the Wolfpack.

The rest of the 1983 team – other than the late head coach Jim Valvano, assistant coach Ed McLean and players Lorenzo Charles and Quinton Leonard – are expected to attend and share their memories and thoughts of the magical nine-game postseason run to the second NCAA team title in school history.

“It will be a good opportunity to celebrate what this team did,” Lowe says. “This is for all of them. We accomplished something special, something that was not good, but great. It’s something that no one thought we could do.

“We did something that even some of the greatest players in the history of the game didn’t do.”

The Wolfpack’s 54-52 victory over heavily favored Houston is still the most memorable ending to a championship game in NCAA history. But was it really the ultimate upset that everyone now dogmatically believes?

Not in Lowe’s eyes.

“It wasn’t necessarily an upset, but because of what some other people said and how Houston was playing and the style that they played, they were definitely the favorite in the game,” Lowe says. “But people didn’t necessarily recognize how well we were playing going into the final game.

“It was a surprise and maybe an upset to a lot of people, but we were playing really well and knew how to win big games. Houston was playing well and winning by big scores. We had experienced some games that were really close and we knew how to win them. We never panicked. Coach V always had a move to make, a play to run, a strategy to try.

“Was it an upset in the eyes of some? Probably so. Did we think we had no chance to win? Definitely not.”

The ’83 team did come from behind in the second half to win seven of its nine postseason games. It beat the defending national champions, North Carolina, in the ACC tournament. It beat Virginia and national player of the year Ralph Sampson twice in a two-week span. It beat a Houston team that was so dominant in its semifinal game against Louisville that “trees will tap dance, elephants will drive at Indy and Orson Welles will skip breakfast, lunch and dinner before North Carolina State finds a way to beat Houston in the NCAA’s college basketball championship game,” according to the Washington Post’s Dave Kindred.

But that’s not the way it turned out, thanks to Charles’ slam dunk of Dereck Whittenburg’s missed shot in the final second at the Pit in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It was a play for the ages, a moment Lowe wishes he could relive one more time with the teammates that helped make it happen and the fans that celebrated and remember the accomplishment.

“I hope the fans know how much I appreciate all they support for our team through all the years,” Lowe says. “And I hope my teammates know I will be with them, even though I’m not there.”

Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu. He is also the author of When March Went Mad, which chronicles the 1983 season and is available for purchase here.

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