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DAVIDSON -- Walker Badham was polititely listening to a guest lecturer discuss the environmental perils of snowmobiles in Yosemite National Park on Wednesday when somebody's BlackBerry beeped and life at Davidson College paused for yet another giddy moment.

Any student who wants to attend the Wildcats' NCAA tournament game against Wisconsin in Detroit on Friday is free to do so, President Tom Ross said in an e-mail sent at 2:24 p.m. All they had to do was reply withinin 96 minutes and the tab -- bus fare, hotel accommodations and game tickets -- would be taken care of, courtesy of the college's trustees.

Too good to be true? Nothing's too good to be true around here these days.

"It's amazing that they would be so generous to let any Davidson student go and enjoy this unbelievable time," said Badham, a senior economics major from Birmingham, Ala.

At first, an anonymous donor had volunteered to subsidize the cost of the journey. Now the whole deal -- expected to run at least $560 per person -- is on the house. It's the Wildcats' best season since 1969, which explains why some faculty responded by encouraging students to take Ross up on his offer.

"I got an e-mail from a teacher who was a student here in 1969," said Meghann Curtis, a junior from suburban Cleveland, "and he said he had been waiting 40 years for this to happen."

There's one catch: The bus leaves at 6 a.m. Friday and the game's set for 7:10 p.m. at Ford Field in Detroit, which, according to Curtis, is an 11-hour drive. She should know. The bus will go right past the exit for her family's home. She won't ask it to stop.

"I'd rather not worry about anything but the game," said Harper Addison, a senior from Atlanta. "It'll be a long ride, but that'll be OK. Let's just not run into any snowstorms, OK?"