BALTIMORE, Maryland -- Twenty-seven years ago, an NCAA championship football bracket included Norfolk State for the first and only time. Those 1984 Spartans, coach Willard Bailey's first team, went 10-1 in their CIAA championship season. They departed the Division II tournament field in the first round, however, on a 10-point loss to Towson State.
But they would be back soon; of course they would. Isn't that how players and coaches and teams and programs are trained to think, to feel, to believe? As six head coaches came to know - seven if you include a guy who once took the job and almost immediately gave it back - "soon" didn't happen.
But maybe that makes Norfolk State's pending postseason return, secured by a 47-14 triumph Saturday at Morgan State that locked down the MEAC title, the purest of nectars to a long-famished fan base. Because it was for this renown that the Spartans (9-2, 7-1) made their then-controversial jump from Division II to the I-AA MEAC in 1997.
And it's for this turn in the national spotlight in two weeks - as 1 of 20 teams in what's now known as the Football Championship Subdivision tournament - that athletic director Marty Miller, among many, has waited. And waited.
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