The Siena team bus arrived at the Tampa Airport Sheraton Suites at 12:25 p.m., and the players were greeted by a loud round of cheers and applause and green and yellow balloons from the hotel staff in the lobby, treated like conquering heros.
They haven't conquered anything yet, though, so they enjoyed the moment, then got down to business with a practice at the Tampa Preparatory School to continue their preparations for Friday's game against Vanderbilt.
After leaving rainy, gray, chilly conditions in Albany, senior guard Tay Fisher walked over to one of the dozens of towering palm trees in the hotel square and touched it.
"I feel like I'm a celebrity, man, an overnight celebrity," Fisher said. "I'm happy to see all these nice and healthy trees, everybody's healthy on our team, it's just really a great feeling. It's something that I'm happy to experience my senior year."
"I couldn't picture all this," sophomore power forward Alex Franklin said. "I wasn't expecting any of this. It's just making the whole day all the better."
The team arrived at Albany International Airport at 7 a.m., and fans were already there to send them off.
"It wasn't like this," said forward Josh Duell of Scotia, referring to the reception he got as a member of the Vermont team that played in the 2005 tournament. "That was pretty special. People in the airport were saying good luck. We were on the plane with a bunch of people, and they kept giving us rounds of applause."
It's a whole different world down here. I knew I wasn't in Albany anymore when I saw a woman in a pink tube top and pink sweatpants enjoying a drink at the bar at Tampa International Airport. At 10:45 a.m. I'm pretty sure her cocoa complexion was not the product of a tanning booth.
The distractions to the team are obvious, but the players and coach Fran McCaffery are confident they won't have any trouble concentrating on their job.
"Now it's time to get really focused," Franklin said. "Now it's time to get to the business part of it. We're living out the dream, but now the reality is setting in.
"We go as hard at practice as we go in the games, so we'll just transfer what we do at practice onto the court."
"We came here on a business trip," Duell said. "We know what to do. We're going to buckle down and work hard at practice."
"I couldn't even sleep last night, I kept waking up like every hour, because I didn't want to get left," Fisher said. "We're enjoying it right now, for a short period of time, and then after that we just have to stay focused, because we came here for a reason."
"We'll get right into it," McCaffery said. "One of the problems we have is Erik Harris and James Carr tweaked their ankles, so we're down on bodies. We'll probably go hard, but not for that long.
"We'll make sure they know what we want to try to do with the gameplan. We'll get a sweat going today. We still have time. We'll watch a lot of film, and a lot more tomorrow and Friday, so by the time the game comes, we'll be ready.
"It's [distractions] just something they'll have to deal with. We try to travel as much as we can, we try to keep all of our road trips consistent, make sure we have a meeting space, do team meals together, so none of that will change. There's obviously more interest in the game, but the rest of
the routine won't change, and they should be fine."