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A trip to Cameron Indoor Stadium isn’t an experience, but an illusion, in which you’ve been sucked through your TV and stumbled onto college basketball’s most famous stage. Enter the Palestra or Hinkle Fieldhouse and you’re intoxicated by history and romance, leaving with an entry knocked off your bucket list.
Fordham’s Rose Hill Gymnasium is the neighborhood joint where everything is the way you remember it. It is where you’ve never been or where you’re certain to return. It takes one trip to learn it like the back of your hand because it isn’t much bigger.
Walk straight into the NCAA’s oldest on-campus basketball arena — opened Jan. 16, 1925 — and you’ll hit a wall, forcing you to turn (left or right) into a narrow hallway, past a parade of plaques of former Rams. The 3,200 seats hug the court. Everyone sits in coach, spitting distance from the sideline, beneath a cathedral ceiling and clerestory windows, allowing sunlight to touch the floor.
You can sit anywhere you like: 1971. 1947. 2023.