So it's Spring of 1994, and the Virginia Men's Basketball Team has parlayed a run to the Finals of the ACC Tournament (after beating defending national champion North Carolina) into a 1st round NCAA Tournament berth in sunny Sacramento CA. The Pep Band felt pretty good about that. It didn't hurt that the 2nd round was to be held a week later in Los Angeles, and if the team made it that far, we all got to stay on the west coast for 9 days. All they had to do was get by Arizona. They didn't, but we had fun watching them try.
They did beat New Mexico in the 1st round. After which, many in the Pep Band were contemplating hanging around to watch the Arizona/Loyola matchup that was to follow. As we were discussing this, the Loyola team and cheerleaders came out, and it became apparent that Loyola doesn't have a band - that is until now . So, after listening to the crying and begging of the Loyola cheerleaders as long as we could stand, we wryly turned our vests around and transformed ourselves into the pro tem Loyola Band, cheering loudly (and fruitlessly) for an upset (our team had to face the winner, and we would have loved for it to be Loyola). We didn't know their fight song, so we decided to arbitrarily make "I Can't Turn You Loose" their fight song for the day. (Some consideration was given to making it "Mission: Impossible," but we figured their morale was low enough as it was.) Our able assistance didn't prove sufficient to keep Loyola from getting creamed by Arizona (and Arizona went on to cream our team the next day) but it did give us some great advance intelligence on the Arizona Band. For example, they have a marginally witty thing they do when an opposing player misses the first of 2 free throws: They yell in unison, "1, 2, 3, Nice Shot, Buddy !" Unfortunately for them, we were prepared the first time they did it to us, immediately replying "1, 2, 3, That's what your mother said!" Other responses included "1, 2, 3, Nice life, losers!", "4, 5, 6, Learning to count is fun at the University of Arizona", etc.