Dedrique Taylor was sitting in a San Antonio hotel room 13 days after he experienced a rush only a coach in his or a similar mid-major position on the college basketball coaching food chain can relate to. It’s a rush better than anything coming out of a lab or pharmacy could produce.

A rush only a trip to the NCAA Tournament can produce. Which is why Taylor was in a San Antonio hotel room, having just arrived two hours earlier. Yes, he was on his way to New Orleans and the Final Four, where two speaking engagements awaited. But the rush of what happened not two weeks earlier in Greenville, S.C., made him wish he could stay in Texas.

Call it duty calling. Screaming.

“The feeling and emotion of wanting to experience this all over again consumes you,” he said from San Antonio. “I’m out on the road recruiting, hitting it hard. The feeling and emotion of what we just experienced just consumes you. It overwhelms you. It makes you hungry to do it again.

“We won the Big West Tournament two of the last four years and been in the conference championship three of the last four years. What does that mean? To me, what does that mean? It means nothing. I want to do it again.”

“Doing it again” would take Taylor, Cal State Fullerton’s men’s basketball coach, back to college basketball’s promised land: the Madness of March. The NCAA Tournament. That’s where he and the Titans went for the second time in four seasons, courtesy of a clutch victory over rival Long Beach State in the finals of the Big West Tournament March 12 in Henderson, Nev.

The Titans reached the NCAA Tournament four times in their history: 1978, 2008, 2018 and 2022. Taylor is responsible for bringing Cal State Fullerton half of those trips to the postseason promised land.

Four years ago, he guided the Titans to the tournament, pulling off an upset of Big West regular-season champion UC Irvine. That party ended in a blowout loss to a much bigger Purdue team.

Like that party, the Titans drew a 15-seed in the 16-team West Region bracket. That earned Cal State Fullerton a date with second-seeded Duke — yes, that Duke. The Titans fell behind early, discovering why second-seeded Duke and its retiring Hall of Fame coach Mike Krzyzewski epitomizes college basketball royalty.

Not six minutes in, Cal State Fullerton was down 17-4. It had no answer for the inside presence of Paolo Banchero and Mark Williams, who wasted no time getting in the heads of the smaller Titans. Vincent Lee, who at 6-foot-8, rarely gets a shot blocked, had two rejected in short order.

“If you rewind a week prior, when we were playing in the Big West Tournament, there wasn’t that type of size,” Taylor said. “If you rewind the whole season, we didn’t play anyone who possessed that kind of size. Most of the teams we played looked like us. When you match up against a team like Duke, you understand they’re in the Final Four for a reason. I did see Duke, and I got firsthand knowledge these guys are huge.”

Yet, the Titans never backed down. They cut the gap to seven halfway through the first half and kept the deficit inside single digits for vast chunks of the late first half, closing within six (31-25) with 4:21 left. But Duke is, well, Duke. It bumped the lead to 10 (37-27) at halftime and slowly pulled away in the second half.

What Taylor marveled at was the freedom Duke played with. He hedged on calling it arrogance, but immediately understood what the No. 2-seed vs. No. 15-seed gulf meant in the college basketball universe. Throw in Krzyzewski’s impending retirement after five national titles and 42 years and the enormity of what the Titans faced was there in 3D living color.

“It wasn’t a chip on their shoulders, but a winner’s arrogance. I don’t want to focus on that word, but what that means,” he said. “They’ve been in those type of situations many times. I talked to one of their assistants, and he was talking about how emotional the year was for them. For them, this was routine. Lets’ face it, for certain teams, the (NCAA) tournament is a foregone conclusion. They play a preseason, a conference season and the postseason. They wholeheartedly expect to be in the NCAA Tournament.

“For teams like us, this is a novelty, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We appreciated it on a different level.”

In the words of All-Big West forward E.J. Anosike, finishing his one and only season for Cal State Fullerton with a team-high 10 rebounds, the Titans “emptied the tank.” Taylor had nothing but good things to say about his team’s performance. He marveled at how Krzyzewski knew about Cal State Fullerton and how he praised the Titans’ defense. The Titans forced 13 turnovers and grabbed eight steals and Krzyzewski knew all about Anosike and Damari Milstead, who led Cal State Fullerton with 12 points.

“In the moment, they understood how hard they competed,” Taylor said. “They were tired. They had to catch their breaths after the game, and it wasn’t because the stage overwhelmed them. It was because of how hard they played. (After the game) they took a moment to rest then they started to talk about themselves, about how they were picked seventh (in the Big West) and nobody expected them to be where they were.

“They had a chip on their shoulder, and that chip was present the moment the Big West Conference Tournament started. They celebrated each other. For a coach to watch your team do that, that to me, is the definition of coaching.”

The appreciation went beyond the locker room. The Titans’ March Madness excursion galvanized the alumni like few other happenings outside of a College World Series run for the baseball team. Taylor said former Cal State Fullerton basketball player Jamal Brown, who lives in South Carolina, was there. So was alum Marc Stein, the former ESPN and New York Times basketball reporter. One of the local watering holes near the Cal State Fullerton campus, BIGS, put on a watch party for the alumni that nearly filled the place.

Toward the end of the game, with the Titans trailing by as many as 19, BIGS broke out into a chant of “Beat the spread. Beat the spread.” Duke closed 18½-point favorites over the Titans and when Fullerton’s Dante Maddox Jr. threw down a majestic dunk with four seconds left — the Titans’ last great act of defiance in Duke’s 17-point victory — the place erupted.

One alum, in Las Vegas on his annual March Madness trip, watched the game from a blackjack table at the Orleans, situating his seat to have an unobstructed view of a nearby television. Another, in Palm Springs for a high school reunion, begged his hotel to let him check in early, so he could get to the hotel bar for the 4:10 p.m. PT tipoff.

“This team did an unbelievable job illustrating what Fullerton is about. Nobody knew where Fullerton is. Nobody expected anything from Fullerton,” Taylor said about a Titans’ team that finished 21-11. “But in our estimation, we represented the school well. There are a lot of high-level, working people representing Fullerton on a day-to-day basis. The alumni reached out around the world, sharing how they felt, and really, that’s what it’s about.”

Did you know…? Taylor treated playing the 29-6 Blue Devils like “a regular team.” He and his assistants put together a “regular scouting report,” like they would any other opponent. “We tried to downplay the fact it was Duke. Obviously, you couldn’t,” he said.

He said it: Taylor on coaching against Mike Krzyzewski, the winningest coach in NCAA Division I history: “He was so gracious, and I couldn’t have expected him to be so knowledgeable of us and our history. When you think of leadership, you think of Coach K. When you think of winning, you think of Coach K, and when you think about college basketball success, you think of Coach K. … You could tell he watched film in terms of knowing he had to stop E.J. and Damari. I didn’t expect him to know us as in-depth as he did. Again, that shows why he is who he is.”

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