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GREENSBORO — The campus was quiet Wednesday morning, as it would be on any morning here amid the 200-year-old oaks and colonial buildings at the edge of the city, as it was 37 years ago to the day.

Jack Jensen remembers that day better than most. But in a sense, we all remember it.

“St. Patrick’s Day 1973,” Jensen said. “That means something to me. I’m one-fourth Irish and have some uncles who are all Irish. Well, they were. They’re all dead now.”

Guilford College is as sleepy now as it was then, a nest of Quakers no longer fighting but still doing what they’ve always tried to do here, upholding the core values of quality, diversity and college basketball.

“It was a quaint little place in those days, and it still is,” said Ted East, a senior on the 1973 Guilford basketball team that would make history. “I can close my eyes and still remember driving onto the campus for the first time and seeing Dana Hall.”

The images are timeless and seamless. The college, the coach, the players and the 1973 NAIA national championship. One of the most studied battles of the American Revolution was fought right up the road from campus. And it’s hard to say which they talk about more here, the battle or the basketball game.

“To this day,” said East, now a probation officer in Winston-Salem. “I think about it all the time. It was important for the school, for the fans and for the people of Greensboro.”

Today in Salem, Va., Guilford will play in the NCAA Division III Final Four, trying to repeat the event that shaped the image and brought national acclaim to this little school all those years ago.

Guilford College, a school of about 1,000 students in 1973, went out to Kansas City 37 years ago Wednesday and won the national championship with a thrilling six-day run capped by a 99-96 win over Maryland-Eastern Shore. The team would send three players to the NBA and produce coaches who would remake the game in this city, molding it in the image of that team.

“We played fast and free,” said Robert Kent, now the coach at Page. “It wasn’t like what you saw in those days.”

There are no videos from that year, only a grainy film of the final. The team exists mostly in people’s memories, a team of great athletes and role players who came together and did something special.

Jensen, still Guilford’s golf coach, sat in his office Wednesday and thought back to that week as he prepared to make the trip to Salem this morning. The names from that team have become synonymous with basketball in this city — M.L. Carr, Lloyd “World B.” Free, Greg Jackson, all of whom would play in the NBA, and John Ralls, Steve Hankins, Robert Kent, all of whom would coach state champions in high school basketball. He talked of the player who quit the team to join the Navy that season, the trainer, the assistants, even the statistician who will drive up to Salem with him today.

“It should be pretty cool,” Jensen said. “It will bring back a lot of the memories.”

He said this team reminds him of the 1973 team, its work ethic and its personalities, its emphasis on team leaders and even its willingness to listen to its coach. Tom Palombo has already joined Jensen and Jerry Steele in the line of successful coaches here. And one day, Jensen said, they’ll talk about Palombo the way people talk about him and his old mentor.

“This may sound like heresy, especially to the older folks here, but Tom is the best coach we’ve ever had here, including me and Coach Steele,” Jensen said.

The older folks in this city remember the names and the games. They remember a team that shocked people and ended up in Sports Illustrated, winning a national title during the glory days of basketball in this state, just after the Final Four runs of Wake , Duke and Carolina , a year before State would win the NCAA championship. The title won by Guilford has a charm to it, a fitting end to an era when people honestly believed, and had good reason to believe, that the old District 26 of the NAIA was equal to or even superior to the ACC or any other major conference.

The team lives on in this city, its influences that once spread to the NBA still influence the players that went on to become high school coaches and the players they coached.

The team lives in a grainy film and in rare photos of young men who accomplished something no one outside a tiny little school in Greensboro thought possible.

“I think about it every day,” East said. “It changed my life forever.”

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com