Pardon me while my mind runneth over:
n The University of Charleston women's basketball team's upset of top-seeded Glenville State in the Mountain East Conference tournament quarterfinals was impressive enough on the surface. Dig a little deeper and it gets even more impressive.
The Golden Eagles held the Pioneers to 57 points in UC's 65-57 win. The Pioneers entered the tournament ranked second in all of Division II, scoring a jaw-dropping 94.4 points per game. That's nearly 10 points per game more than the MEC's No. 2, West Virginia State. The third-best scoring team in the conference, Fairmont State, sits nearly 20 points per game behind Glenville.
All the Golden Eagles did was hold the Pioneers more than 37 points below their season average. Glenville State had only scored fewer than 70 points once before during this season, a 79-66 loss at Wheeling Jesuit.
Glenville shot 39.3 percent from the field for the season entering Thursday's game. The Pioneers shot 22.2 percent against Charleston. The Pioneers shot 31.6 from 3-point range for the season entering Thursday, and averaged 14.5 3-pointers made. Against UC, they shot 13.2 percent and made just 5 of 38 attempts from beyond the arc, missing all 18 second-half attempts.
Defense wins championships, as they say. It certainly won Charleston that game.
n The Kanawha Valley's presence has been felt on the court during the MEC tournament. Several area players populate the teams' rosters. (Tip of the cap to UC men's basketball player Jaylen Hinton for compiling this list.)
On the women's side, Hurricane's Abby Watson and Sissonville's Madison Jones play for Charleston, while George Washington's Rachel Ward plays for West Virginia State and fellow former Patriot Kelli Jo Harrison plays for Fairmont State. South Charleston's Taliah Cashwell is a member of the Wheeling Jesuit roster.
On the men's side, West Virginia Wesleyan has a pair of local players, Riverside's Jaquan Brock and Winfield's Alex Osburn.
n There's a West Virginia University flavor at both the bottom and the top of the seedings at the MEC men's tournament. Jerrod Calhoun, a former WVU assistant under Bob Huggins, is the head coach at Fairmont State and has guided the Falcons to become one of the top teams in the nation. They entered the tournament as the No. 1 team in NCAA Division II. They're also the second-best scoring team in the country, averaging 99.1 points.
But another former Mountaineer patrolled the sideline as well this week. Former WVU player Rob Summers is the head men's coach at Urbana, which came into the tournament as the No. 9 seed and lost to UC in the first round. Summers played three seasons for former WVU coach John Beilein after transferring from Penn State. He shot 63.3 percent from the floor as a senior, when the Mountaineers won the NIT.
The Blue Knights finished the season at 12-17, but the journey to those 12 wins is laudable. The season before Summers arrived, in 2013-14, the Blue Knights went winless. Summers won six games in his first season and slipped to two wins the next. But the team's 10-win turnaround this year is the best in program history.
"I told these guys before [Wednesday's] game, whatever happens, I was proud of them," Summers said after the UC loss. "We've been down in the past. So for us in three years to make this jump, it was huge for us and huge for our future. These guys really buckled down. I tell them all the time, I take the blame for all the losses. All the wins go to them. They put the ball in the hole."
Contact Derek Redd at 304-348-1712 or derek.redd@wvgazettemail.com. Follow him on Twitter @derekredd.