MANSFIELD, Pa. — There are certain goodbyes that stay with you.

Steve Shannon's came at half court inside Decker Gymnasium.

His final game in a Mansfield uniform was over. Four years of practices, road trips, weight-room sessions, bruising battles in the paint, friendships and memories had reached their end. Before walking away, Shannon moved toward center court, looked down at the "M" beneath his feet, bent over and kissed it.

"I went to half court and kissed the M," Shannon remembered. "It was just a way to say goodbye."

At the time, he probably believed he was saying goodbye to basketball.

Nearly three decades later, Shannon understands that he was trying to say goodbye to something far more difficult to leave behind.

A team.

A town.

A university.

A community that had taken a kid from Fairview, Pennsylvania — a kid who had barely heard of Mansfield — and made him one of its own.

"Being able to wear that M on your chest was special," Shannon said. "But it meant representing that whole community."

The record book preserves what happened in between.

Shannon finished his career with 1,231 points and 803 rebounds. He earned First Team All-PSAC East honors, was named Mansfield Male Winter Athlete of the Year, won a PSAC Championship and eventually earned his place in the Mansfield University Athletic Hall of Fame.

Those numbers explain what Steve Shannon accomplished at Mansfield.

That kiss at half court explains what Mansfield came to mean to him.

A Place He Had Never Heard Of

Long before Shannon became a champion or a Hall of Famer, Mansfield was simply a name he did not know.

He was preparing for his senior year of high school and playing in an AAU tournament outside Pittsburgh when Mansfield assistant coach Pat Donnelly noticed him.

"I had a good tournament," Shannon said. "He liked what he saw."

Soon, letters from Mansfield began arriving.

Head coach Tom Ackerman became involved in Shannon's recruitment, and Shannon turned to his high school coach, Joe Spinelli, a coach with enough collegiate experience to understand both his player and the kind of program that might fit him.

Spinelli saw a match.

Mansfield played physical basketball. Its post players screened, defended, rebounded and battled. It was not basketball built entirely around flash. There was room for toughness, effort and players willing to do the work that often mattered more than it appeared in a box score.

That sounded a lot like Steve Shannon.

"My high school coach was kind of steering me that way," Shannon said. "He told me, 'I think Mansfield would be perfect for you.'"

Then Shannon visited.

Something clicked almost immediately.

"Once I hit campus for the first time and saw it, I was like, 'Yep. This is it.'"

It was the beginning of a relationship neither Mansfield nor Shannon could have fully understood yet.

Because Shannon arrived having already heard plenty about what he supposedly could not do.

Some schools thought he was undersized for his position. Others questioned whether he moved well enough to play there at the collegiate level.

Ackerman saw something else.

"I credit Coach A for giving me a shot at Mansfield," Shannon said. "I went to different schools and heard, 'We like you, but you're kind of undersized,' or, 'You don't move very well for the position you're going to play.' Coach Ackerman was the guy who took a chance on me."

Shannon spent the next four years making that chance worthwhile.

He did it in the only way he knew how.

He worked.

When he arrived as a freshman, upperclassmen Rick Shaw, Barrett Jones and Lou Judson helped bring him into the group. Shannon did not know exactly what his role would become, but he quickly realized there was a place for him if he was willing to earn it.

"I figured out pretty quickly that I could have a substantial role," Shannon said. "I didn't know I would become a starter that year. I just knew I could help by being physical and working as hard as anybody else."

He became a freshman starter.

Then he kept the job for four years.

For Shannon, earning the position was never the point.

Keeping it was.

"Being named a starter is great, but then it's up to you to put in the work to keep that position," he said. "My goal was to outwork everybody on the court. Whether it was my own teammates in practice or opponents during a game, you weren't going to outwork me."

Shannon never pretended he was the most naturally gifted player in the gym.

That was part of what made him dangerous.

He understood exactly who he was.

So he got stronger. He embraced contact. He defended the post. He set screens. He attacked the glass. He made effort a skill.

"I wasn't super gifted physically," Shannon said. "I knew I had to be physical and I had to work hard. I prided myself on that."

Eventually, that mentality made him one of the most accomplished players in Mansfield history.

Before that, it made him exactly what one of Mansfield's greatest teams needed.

The Winter Mansfield Believed

The 1996–97 Mountaineers were picked to finish fifth in the PSAC East.

They finished 26–4.

They won the PSAC Championship, earned a national ranking and advanced to the NCAA Tournament.

Thirty years later, the numbers still look remarkable.

Shannon remembers something else.

The chemistry.

"There were no big egos on the team," he said. "Big personalities for sure, but the egos weren't there."

That distinction mattered.

There was talent everywhere, but there was also an understanding that talent alone would not make Mansfield special.

Everyone had a role.

Kenny Woseley was the leader who helped hold everything together. Lawrence Culver brought size, strength and emotion. Lou Judson was, in Shannon's affectionate description, "an assassin." Tommy Harvey could put his head down and become a nightmare for anyone trying to stay in front of him.

Bryan Zardezed, Kevin Perluke and the rest of the group understood that championships were not built only by the five players standing on the floor at the opening tip.

Shannon was comfortable being the glue.

"I was just trying to do anything on the court that needed to be done," Shannon said. "Everybody knew their role. You could look around and say, 'That's your job. That's your job. That's your job.' Everybody knew it, and they went to work."

There was still a moment when a talented team realized it could become something more.

Mansfield was in Erie for a holiday tournament. A difficult loss to Gannon stung. Then came a game against a talented Virginia Union team.

The Mountaineers responded.

For Shannon, that was the moment belief stopped being theoretical.

"That was it," he said. "There was no more looking back. This is how we're playing every night."

From there, Mansfield became one of the most explosive teams in the country.

The Mountaineers averaged a school-record 96.6 points per game. A rebound became an outlet. The outlet became another pass. Before an opponent could organize itself, Mansfield was already attacking the rim.

"We had talented athletes, but we also had the size, physicality and speed," Shannon said. "We had it all."

And as the wins accumulated, something was happening around them.

Decker Gymnasium was filling.

Night after night, a basketball team became the gathering place for a campus and a town.

"It was the best ticket in town," Shannon said. "The place was buzzing. There wasn't an empty seat."

Shannon's roommates embraced the moment in a way only college students could. They cut basketballs in half, carved eye holes into them and wore the ridiculous creations on their heads in the stands.

It was part basketball game, part neighborhood gathering, part campus spectacle.

It was loud.

It was crowded.

It was personal.

It was Decker.

It was Mansfield.

By the time the PSAC Championship tournament arrived, the Mountaineers had earned the opportunity to play for a conference title in front of the same people who had packed the gym all winter.

Mansfield defeated California in the semifinal.

Then came Clarion.

Then came the final buzzer.

Steve Shannon was a PSAC Champion.

"I was definitely emotional," he said. "I didn't have a whole lot of time to be emotional because I was dogpiled by half the football team."

For a few moments, Shannon disappeared beneath a pile of celebrating Mountaineers until an assistant coach started pulling bodies away.

Then came the nets.

The hugs.

The noise.

The release of everything that had gone into getting there — the conditioning, lifts, practices, early mornings, physical battles, sacrifices and bruises nobody saw when the lights came on.

"It was the culmination of that year and all the work we put in," Shannon said. "Being able to let some of that emotion go after the buzzer sounded was pretty special."

There is another moment from that season Shannon still carries with him.

Mansfield traveled to Bloomsburg with an opportunity to clinch the PSAC East regular-season championship.

The game came down to the final possession.

Bloomsburg had the ball.

A final shot went into the air.

It missed.

Steve Shannon secured the rebound as the horn sounded.

Of course he did.

"To beat them on their floor and clinch the regular-season title was really cool," Shannon said.

For a player whose career became synonymous with rebounding, there may not have been a more fitting way to secure a championship.

The ball went up.

Shannon went and got it.

Work Was His Leadership Style

Championship teams do not remain frozen in time.

Seniors graduate. Locker-room voices disappear. Roles change. Eventually, someone else has to carry the standard.

Following Mansfield's championship season, more of that responsibility fell to Shannon.

He was never interested in becoming someone he was not. He was not naturally loud, and he did not suddenly transform into the player giving dramatic speeches before every game.

He led in the language he understood best.

Work.

"If coach had us line up and run 17s, I wanted to be first," Shannon said. "If we were doing a drill down low and coach threw the ball up and said, 'Go get it,' I wanted to be the guy coming down with it every time."

He wanted to be first in the weight room and among the last to leave.

He wanted younger teammates to see his effort before they ever had to hear him explain it.

By his senior season, years of that work had transformed him.

Shannon averaged 16.3 points per game, ranked fifth in the PSAC in scoring and led the conference in rebounding.

There was a sign inside the Mansfield locker room that stayed with him:

"You can dribble, shoot and pass too much, but you can't rebound and play defense enough."

Shannon probably never needed the reminder.

"I always prided myself on getting that rebound, getting the extra offensive rebound, setting a hard screen and playing good defense," he said. "If I worked really hard on the defensive end and on the boards, the stuff on the other end was gravy."

Then comes the line that may explain Steve Shannon the rebounder better than any statistic ever could.

"I was a ball hog," he said with a laugh. "If it was up, it was going to be me getting it."

He studied Dennis Rodman and Hakeem Olajuwon. He trained. He got stronger. He learned positioning. He figured out how to make an opposing post player feel him for 40 minutes.

By the end of his Mansfield career, the overlooked, undersized kid had accumulated 1,231 points and 803 rebounds.

At the time, only one other player in program history had reached both 1,200 points and 800 rebounds.

Shannon earned First Team All-PSAC East honors and was named the 1999 Mansfield Male Winter Athlete of the Year.

Still, one of the things that meant the most to him was seeing his name connected statistically to someone he had admired.

Brian White.

"To me, Brian White was Mansfield basketball," Shannon said. "To be mentioned alongside a guy like that statistically was pretty cool."

Years later, Shannon does not talk about his career as though it were proof of how gifted he was.

He sees almost the opposite.

"I wasn't the most gifted athlete in the world," Shannon said. "To accomplish what I did with what I was given shows what you can do with a lot of hard work."

That may be the most Steve Shannon sentence of them all.

Mansfield Gave Him More Than a Game

There is another reason Shannon's Mansfield story can never be told only through basketball.

Kelly was there.

Kelly Morris Shannon built one of the great careers in Mansfield softball history under legendary head coach Edith Gallagher. She established major pitching records, became the first Mountaineer pitcher to earn All-PSAC East recognition and later began her collegiate coaching journey on Gallagher's Mansfield staff.

From there, Kelly went to Lock Haven, helped the Bald Eagles win two NCAA Division II national championships and eventually became the winningest head coach in program history.

Steve has watched the journey from the beginning.

"You couldn't ask for a better start to a collegiate coaching career than having G as your mentor," Shannon said of Gallagher. "She's one of a kind, both as a person and as a coach."

In 2009, Mansfield gave Steve and Kelly another moment to share.

Both were inducted into the Mansfield University Athletic Hall of Fame as members of the same class.

"To be able to go in the same year as your wife was pretty special," Shannon said.

Then came the line only a husband could deliver.

"It's probably the only reason I got in, because I got in with her."

The joke comes easily.

So does the pride.

Because somewhere amid all the practices, games, classes and ordinary days on a small campus in northern Pennsylvania, Mansfield gave Steve Shannon much more than a basketball career.

It gave him the person with whom he would build his life.

Steve and Kelly now live in Lewisburg with their three children. Their oldest daughter, Kimmy, is a junior at the University of Tennessee and competes on the swim team. Their son, Colin, is a high school junior who plays baseball and swims. Their youngest daughter, Morgan, is a sophomore who competes in softball and swimming.

Steve recently entered his 25th year working in corrections and earned a promotion to sergeant.

And when Steve and Kelly look at their children, they recognize pieces of the lessons they first learned years ago at Mansfield.

"We have a foundation now that we're able to pass along to our kids," Shannon said. "A lot of what we learned at Mansfield is coming out in them. We're instilling that same work ethic. If you want something, you've got to go get it. You don't whine. You don't complain."

The record book will never have a column for that.

It may be Mansfield's longest-lasting statistic of all.

What Cannot Change

College athletics no longer looks exactly like the world Steve Shannon knew.

The transfer portal has changed the way rosters are built. Players move more freely. Financial realities have shifted. Coaches often have less time to recruit, retain and develop a group together.

Shannon readily admits he does not know exactly where all of it is going.

But he knows what Mansfield cannot afford to lose.

Its identity.

"The one thing you can't lose is the hard work," Shannon said. "It's blue-collar stuff. You have to be willing to work harder than anybody else."

That mentality once allowed a basketball team picked fifth in its division to hang a championship banner from the Decker rafters.

"That was our mentality," Shannon said. "We were going to work harder than you day in and day out."

But Shannon's message to today's student-athletes extends beyond winning games.

Do your job on the court.

Go to class.

Know your professors.

Make friends outside your sport.

Experience the campus.

Experience the town.

Do not spend four years somewhere without allowing yourself to become part of it.

Ackerman told Shannon something during his first days at Mansfield that he never forgot: sit in the front of the classroom and make sure the professor knows your name by the end of the semester.

Shannon listened.

"You've got to be well-balanced," he said. "Have a good academic life, athletic life and extracurricular life. Make sure you have a good balance of each."

Eventually, the season ends.

Then the career ends.

The uniform comes off.

What remains are the people, the experiences and the place.

Thirty Years Later

On Saturday, Feb. 13th, 2027, Steve Shannon will walk through the doors of Decker Gymnasium again.

Mansfield will welcome back the 1996–97 PSAC Championship team on the 30th anniversary of one of the greatest seasons in program history when the Mountaineers host Bloomsburg at 3 p.m.

There will be old teammates who look a little different.

Stories that have improved with every telling.

Memories that happened three decades ago and somehow still do not feel very far away.

Current Mansfield head coach John Szentesy will be there, too.

Thirty years earlier, Szentesy was a student assistant on Ackerman's championship staff, watching history unfold from the Mansfield bench.

Now he leads the program whose history he once watched being made.

At some point that afternoon, Shannon knows his eyes will drift upward.

Toward the rafters.

Toward the banner.

"You get a chance to look up and see our banner and know you were part of that," Shannon said. "It's not easy to do. Putting those banners up in the rafters is not an easy thing."

He is right.

If championships were easy, banners would lose their meaning.

That one has now been hanging inside Decker for 30 years.

It belongs to Brian McMahon, Kevin Perluke, Damoun Lopez, Richard Harrison, Anthony Brown, Louis Judson, Tommy Harvey, Remar Tate, Kenny Woseley, Steve Shannon, Bryan Zardezed, Lawrence Culver and Darrin Bates.

It belongs to Tom Ackerman and the coaches who guided them.

It belongs to the students wearing ridiculous basketball helmets in the stands, the football players who buried Shannon beneath a championship celebration and the people who squeezed into Decker Gymnasium because, for that winter, there was nowhere else they would rather be.

That banner is more than the final record of a basketball season.

It is a piece of fabric that somehow survived as evidence of a feeling.

A winter when a team trusted one another.

A campus gathered around them.

A town filled a gym.

And Mansfield believed together.

"You look at it and go, 'Wow,'" Shannon said. "'We did that.'"

Not I did that.

We did.

Thirty years later, maybe that is why it still matters.

The Magic of Mansfield

Ask Shannon what being a Mountaineer meant during his playing days and he remembers a feeling.

"Us versus everybody else."

There was something about the smallness of Mansfield that made the experience feel larger.

Teammates became family because everyone was always around. People in town knew who you were. Professors knew your name. Someone you passed walking across campus in the morning might be sitting in Decker cheering for you that night.

There was very little separation between the team and the place it represented.

"It was tailor-made for somebody like me," Shannon said. "You go there and you fall in love with it. It's just a special place. It will always have a special place in my heart."

That is the part of Mansfield that cannot be measured.

Steve Shannon arrived because Pat Donnelly saw something in him at an AAU tournament outside Pittsburgh.

He came because Tom Ackerman was willing to give an undersized post player an opportunity when other schools were not.

He stayed because Mansfield felt right.

Then, slowly, the place became part of his life.

He became a starter there.

A champion there.

A Hall of Famer there.

He met his wife there.

He found coaches who believed in him, teammates who became lifelong friends and a community worth representing every time he put the "M" across his chest.

Years later, Steve and Kelly are passing the values they learned there to their children.

Soon, he will return to Decker and look toward a banner that proves what 13 young men and their coaches once accomplished together.

The wins matter.

The records matter.

The plaques matter.

The banners certainly matter.

But eventually, sports gives way to life, and the things that remain become easier to understand.

A university becomes a community.

A coach becomes a mentor.

Teammates become family.

A place you had never heard of becomes a place you cannot imagine your life without.

And a letter stitched across the front of a jersey becomes part of who you are.

Which brings Steve Shannon's story back to center court.

Back to his final game.

Back to the "M" beneath his feet.

Four years earlier, he had arrived at Mansfield as an overlooked kid from Fairview, Pennsylvania looking for an opportunity.

Now he was leaving as a champion, one of the finest rebounders in program history and a young man whose life had been permanently changed by the place.

So he bent down and kissed the floor.

He thought it was time to say goodbye.

Nearly three decades later, perhaps the most beautiful part of Steve Shannon's Mansfield story is realizing that he never really had to.

The games ended.

The uniform came off.

But the "M" stayed.

It stayed in the championship banner hanging above Decker.

It stayed in the friendships.

It stayed in the work ethic he carried into the rest of his life.

It stayed in the family he built with another Mountaineer.

And it stayed in the feeling that still comes back whenever he talks about a little town in northern Pennsylvania that once took a chance on him. 

Some goodbyes stay with you.

Some places do, too.

Once a Mountie, Always a Mountie.