SPOKANE, Wash. — Once the guys for whom it means more finally ran out of chances, a guard named August from a town known for horse racing spun around, untucked his jersey and climbed atop a courtside table. He smiled with his mouth open and said nothing.

He quickly was joined by a kid from Morocco who likes to fish, who pointed and yelled at everyone he saw. Behind them, the lefty Greek sharpshooter from the Chicago suburbs ran into the arms of the 7-foot center who went from freshman backup to a spot on Team Israel and the All-Ivy League squad in one year. In front of them, a scruffy 16-year NBA veteran who slung his 6-foot-11 frame over a guardrail hustled in for a hug. The head coach came by last, arms out wide, leaning into a vigorous multi-human scrum that knocked off his lapel pin and included an elbow to a writer’s head.

Yale 78, Auburn 76 at Spokane Arena on Friday was at once a result and a revival and another episode in an ongoing, hilarious reckoning. An eclectic No. 13 seed beating a No. 4 seed overloaded with size and athleticism and talent. An Ivy League champion ousting an SEC champion, and not by accident. A forever March moment for a player whose girlfriend is more famous than him. The airy whimsy of the NCAA Tournament triumphing, yet again, over the sulfur cloud threatening it. The sword drawn from the stone, then driven right back through a bigger one.

“It shouldn’t be a surprise anymore,” said Chris Dudley, the aforementioned former pro and overjoyed alum sporting a Yale polo shirt, still on the lookout for his next hug. “This is a good team. It’s a real good team. We got great players. Just ’cause you go to a good school, doesn’t mean you can’t hoop.”

It’s of course a little bit of a surprise, and that’s the point. Assumptions are built into this event. Teams are assigned numbers and, with them, expectations. And then something like Yale happens. A junior guard named John Poulakidas, who abused his mini-hoop as a kid so much that it chipped the door it hung on, whose recruiting got fogged up by a pandemic, who heads to the gym to shoot after logging starter’s minutes in games, drops in a career-high 28 points. And Auburn, ranked seventh in the final Associated Press poll and considered a worthy threat to defending national champion UConn in the East Region, loses in the Round of 64 for the first time.

There are those who would warp the structure of the NCAA Tournament essentially to the detriment of the Yales of the world, probably because the Yales of the world keep doing this stuff. The Bulldogs did it in 2016, too, upsetting Baylor in the first round. With formidable but offensively challenged San Diego State awaiting Sunday, it’s not far-fetched to believe the Bulldogs can be the second straight Ivy League team to reach the Sweet 16, after Princeton in 2023. “That’s what makes March Madness special,” Yale big man Danny Wolf said Friday. “It’s games like this.”

YALE MEN’S BASKETBALL WINS ITS SECOND NCAA TOURNAMENT GAME IN SCHOOL HISTORY pic.twitter.com/iqFjZVsTL5

— CBS Sports (@CBSSports) March 22, 2024

It is days like the best day of John Poulikidas’ life, when it only seemed like he barged into the world.

That mini-hoop hung over the front door of the house in Naperville, Ill., and faced inward toward a spacious common area. Plenty of room for the kids, especially the two boys, to mess around. Every time it rattled, it chipped at the paint on the door, much to Hadi Poulakidas’ dismay. But mom never moved the hoop. This was life. “She let me be,” Poulakidas said in an extremely loud locker room Thursday.

He became obsessed with the game, wearing NBA jerseys to school every day, watching games every night, forgoing all other sporting endeavors. “It’s been what I eat, sleep and breathe ever since I was a kid,” he said. Yale associate head coach Matt Kingsley discovered the high school version of Poulakidas one June, tearing up a Chicago-area summer league with his Neuqua Valley High School team, making impossible shot after impossible shot. The pandemic interfered — Yale coach James Jones never saw Poulakidas play live, in fact, during the recruiting process — but Yale was dogged, demonstrating how it would use the big guard in its system. An analytical player with a family that emphasized academics was sold.

By the time his junior year arrived, Poulakidas was a starter, a proven tough shot-maker and a perfectionist entirely in control of potential outcomes in his workouts. “He tells me what he wants to do,” Kingsley said Thursday. “He has a vision of the shots he can make.” Many of them, as it turns out. Poulakidas entered the postseason as Yale’s second-leading scorer for the second straight season, and his 75 3-pointers were the second-highest single-season total in program history. He also was maybe best known, if at all, as the boyfriend of Kylie Feuerbach, who plays for the rock-band phenomenon known as Iowa women’s basketball. No one would have guessed all of this was a prelude to what occurred against Auburn … but maybe they should have.

“I tell him every time, if we win the game, it’s going to be because of him,” Wolf said. “You don’t have many shotmakers in the country that can get a bucket like he can.”

Late afternoon Friday, many years later and a couple thousand miles west, the Poulakidas’ oldest child had another moment with a ball and a hoop that peeled some paint. He was now a college junior but no more worried about the damage his shot could do, not when he was five 3-pointers into the night already, not when he’d hit a preposterous fadeaway jumper over 6-11 Auburn big man Dylan Cardwell and stared down his own bench as he raced back up the floor. “After I hit my first couple shots,” he said, “the floodgates opened.” And now there were two minutes left and his team faced a one-point deficit in the NCAA Tournament and he let it fly from well beyond the 3-point arc. He hit it. Those at Spokane Arena susceptible to magic lost it. Completely.

As he backpedaled down the floor, Poulakidas turned to the crowd. He caught sight of his parents.

Oh my God, he screamed.

Divine, for sure. Not providential. Again: You have to work to drive that sword through the stone. “I love what basketball can do for you and the people around you, if that makes any sense,” Poulakidas said. “It’s crazy how winning one game today, winning one game last weekend (in the Ivy League tournament) against Brown, can just completely bring a group of people together. I’m just so grateful and glad to be a part of that.”

There were many parts to it. August Mahoney, the senior captain and native of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. — town slogan: “Health, History, and Horses” — who grinded through three first-half fouls to finish with 14 points in 26 minutes, including a 9-of-11 showing at the free-throw line. Wolf, the leading scorer who had one first-half field goal but hit two key free throws to extend the lead with 45 seconds left. Jones, the criminally underrated head coach who is approaching 400 wins with an Ivy League school, who threw on a Yankees hat in the locker room after he cautioned against the emotional over-indulgence that doomed his team seven years prior.

“I tried to tame the reactions,” Jones said, “and to make them understand we have more work to do.”

They understand it, even if no one else does.

On the eve of NCAA Tournament play, Dudley sent text messages to an old foil on television named Charles Barkley, warning him not to underestimate the Bulldogs. “They can flat-out play,” Dudley said. Proven right, he was off to enjoy his Friday night more than even he expected. But then these are the moments that creep up on you. You don’t always get where you want to go in a hurry. Most of the time, you just chip away until you’re there.

(Photo of John Poulakidas: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)