The second half, just a few possessions in, players were struggling, already stuck in the mud. Standing by his Jefferson University bench, coach Herb Magee let out a favorite plea: “Someone, please, make a shot.”

That took a while. A missed free throw, followed by another missed front end of a one-and-one by a different Jefferson player, had Magee shaking his head. “I could make that blindfolded.”

His Rams survived this last road trip of Magee’s last regular season, Feb. 19 at Georgian Court University, after overtime finally produced some successful jumpers and Jefferson got away with a 74-67 victory. Seconds ticking down in OT in Lakewood, N.J., his top player off to urgent care with a badly sprained ankle, Magee stood courtside and said, “I’m glad I’m retiring; I can’t deal with this.”

What was really going on — Magee quips aside — was a reminder that you do not win the second-most basketball games in NCAA history without sweating every step. To the last of his 55 years in charge on Henry Avenue, this man who grew up in West Philadelphia stood courtside ignoring the ticking clock of his own years, grimacing, grumbling, living each screen, every pivot, each jump shot.

“It’s all shooting, the whole game of basketball,” Magee said later, distilling his life’s work.

Officially retired now after one last overtime loss in the conference tournament, Magee, who turns 81 in June, is second only to Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski on the all-time NCAA victory list, finishing with 1,144 victories

He’d been dubbed “The King” long ago by his pal Jim Lynam.

“Jimmy will tell you it was from the movie King Rat,” Magee said, referring to a 1965 film about a fast-talking wheeler-dealer, and telling how Lynam was “The Kid,” and all their friends had nicknames.

Magee’s own method of operation ... pure confidence. He believed in himself, as a player, coach, a shooting instructor without parallel. That confidence was completely contagious. If you were around Herb, you were in the right place.

There are people who wonder, what if Magee coached in the Big 5, or the Big Ten, or the NBA? He mused about it himself at times. But that’s messing with karma on a grand scale. Magee’s path led to his 2011 induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

“Any part of my ego that wasn’t satisfied, it was satisfied,” Magee said later of that induction.

Magee is the only NCAA coach to have spent his entire career at one school under four different names. Philadelphia Textile College. Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science. Philadelphia University. Thomas Jefferson University. It was always Herb’s school. This is a man who was inducted into the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame -- in 1979.

An actual Textile cheer from back in the day:

“Hit them with a shuttle, hit them with a loom…Textile, Textile, boom, boom, boom.”

“Knit one, pearl two……Textile, Textile, woo, woo, woo.”

The home games, all on Henry Avenue, except for a lot of years Magee would bring one opponent into the Palestra. If you start adding up all the miles on all the bus trips, there really is one true King.

“It’s all bus trips,” Magee said of his career.

Take 1989-90: Over 3,400 miles for the regular-season games, just campus to campus. To New Haven and West Chester and Lock Haven and Bloomsburg and up to Upstate New York to Le Moyne, then over to Buffalo, and to Long Island for C.W. Post, and the trip across the state to Erie for Gannon and Mercyhurst.

More recently, the schedule got a bit kinder, with a league featuring closer teams, but that still meant 2,400 miles this season. Average it out maybe to 3,000 miles a season. That’s more than 150,000 bus miles for a career. That bus could have circumnavigated the globe more than six times.

» READ MORE: Photos of Herb Magee's final regular season game at Jefferson University

How many times did Magee hear a new driver tell about how the windows on each side of the bus have levers at the bottom you can lift, and there are fire extinguishers under each of the front seats? How many postgame pizza slices? Two for Coach. “Plain only,” Magee said of his preference.

How many times did Magee think he could stump Jimmy Reilly, now his successor, with a trivia question from before Reilly was born? (Not as many times as he expected.) How many pregame diners after dropping off the women’s team for the first game of the doubleheader?

With that many miles, there’s time to tell a story or two. Here, Magee also was the King. Who else coaching today around Philadelphia played pickup games with Tom Gola and Paul Arizin?

“Towards the end of his career,” Magee said on the bus to Georgian Court, about playing with Arizin. Magee had modeled his own exquisite jump shot after that man who is widely credited with inventing the form. “When the game got close, he just took it over.”

That all came up when the subject of “best Villanova player ever” came up.

“You’re all too young to have seen Paul Arizin play,” Magee said, ending that discussion.

Magee’s own scoring feats pass through legend on the way to myth, like the time he and Sonny Hill were on an independent league team together.

“We used to split 80 points, often right down the middle,” Magee said of playing with Hill, except that didn’t leave a lot of shots for teammates, one of whom called to tell him, “The team is being dissolved.”

“I can’t blame you,” Magee remembers telling him.

There was another league at Rose playground in West Philly. Earl “The Pearl” Monroe made occasional appearances. Magee made most of the games. When his last one was about to start one year, a player from another team told Magee, “I’ve got you this time, I’m going to win the scoring title.”

Magee asked the guy what he was talking about. Magee hadn’t made all the games, he was told, so the other guy had more points.

“What do I need tonight?”

“60.”

“OK, stay and watch the game.”

Magee remembers how after he had scored 70, “I sat out the last five minutes,” telling the guy, “You shouldn’t have told me that.”

Those days, Magee said, they played in all sorts of leagues, at Rose and Tustin and Finnegan and Narberth. There were no cell phones, only pay phones at each rec center, he said, “close to the action.” There would be someone from their group stationed at the pay phone. A call would come in from another rec center.

“What’s happening?”

“We’re down 10.”

“Ok, send Herb and Bobby over …”

They’d trade players in the middle of the game, he said, trying to get two wins for the neighborhood out of the day.

The story of how Magee ended up at Philadelphia Textile while West Catholic teammates Lynam and Jimmy Boyle went on to star at St. Joe’s is the stuff of legend. What’s the real story on that? Did Jack Ramsay, eventual Naismith Hall of Famer himself after winning an NBA title, get confused on who he was recruiting?

“The true story, his assistant, Dan Kenney, came to see us play one night, and liked Jimmy a lot, and Jimmy Boyle,” Magee said. “He told Ramsay, you’ve got to recruit them.”

So Ramsay showed up. Magee is sure the game was at North Catholic. (“Never tell Herb something you want him to forget,” one of his former players said.) After the game, Lynam and Boyle were told Ramsay wanted to see them. They walked into the room.

“No, no, you’ve got the wrong guy,” Ramsay said.

The St. Joe’s coach didn’t have a roster. He’s been watching Magee all game thinking he was one of the guys he was supposed to be recruiting.

The Hawks stuck with Lynam and Boyle, two legends there, each eventually taking turns as head coach. It all worked out for everyone involved. Magee and Ramsay laughed about it when Ramsay introduced him at the Naismith Hall of Fame.

“He even said, ‘You know, Herb, I probably should have recruited you.”

‘I might have coached St. Joe’s,” Magee told him.

“Yeah, you might have,” Ramsay said.

“But not for 45 years,” Magee said that day in 2011.

His whole life story is something out of a novel. Magee’s mother died when he was 12 and his father when he was 13. He was one of four brothers living at 45th and Baltimore. Another uncle moved in, but it was his Uncle Edwin — the Rev. Edwin Gallagher – who was in charge, visiting twice a week either from his assignment as Catholic chaplain at Eastern State Penitentiary or, later, a parish assignment at St. Michael’s in Fishtown.

“When he came home, he was all business,” Magee said. " ‘Let me see your grades. What did you do here? When’s your next game? We’re all going to say the rosary.’ "

If Magee won a big game, the priest would slip him a $10 or a $20 bill. Magee also visited the prison a couple of times, to play pickup games with the prisoners.

“The guard tower was right there,” Magee said, visiting the prison in 2013, “and these guys screaming at you, right here. No pressure.”

On the bus to Georgian Court, Magee told how Jack McKinney, another storied Philadelphia coach, got him a job at the Aronimink Swim Club in Drexel Hill. “They needed another guy so I called Jimmy [Lynam], said, ‘Jimmy, it’s the best job in the world. You don’t do anything but play [basketball] with the kids.”

Not all of them belonged to the swim club. Somebody would tell Magee there were guys at the fence. Maybe he had called those guys, from the Villanova and St. Joe’s and Textile teams.

“I’d go in my office and hide and let them jump the fence,” Magee told his assistants on the bus.

That reminded Jimmy Reilly, also a West Catholic graduate, of a similar job Reilly once had at Finnegan’s playground in Southwest Philly, which reminded Magee, “That’s where I met Bucky Harris.”

Harris was his future college coach on Henry Avenue.

“He knocked you into the pole, right?” Reilly said, explaining that there were two poles holding up the baskets. “If you came in for a layup, you were getting drilled into that pole.”

“That’s what he did to me,” Magee said of Harris. “The next year he recruited me. I was afraid to say no.”

At Textile, Harris told Magee, pass up an open shot and you’re coming out. Magee followed orders. In three seasons, this 5-foot-10 guard scored 2,235 points — 24 points a game — before there was a three-point line. Harris was known to the players as God. Magee was Baby Jesus.

First an assistant, then head coach in 1967-68. In 1970, Textile won an NCAA national college-division championship. Magee’s teams won the Middle Atlantic Conference and the Mideast Collegiate Conference and the New York Collegiate Conference and most recently the Central Atlantic Collegiate Conference. He faced 33 different schools in the NCAA tournament alone. There were battles with John Beilein at Le Moyne. Epic battles with John Chaney at Cheyney.

“One time, we’re winning the game. I’m kneeling down [by Magee’s bench],” Magee said on the bus. “I look up. He’s standing over me. He says, ‘Where’d you get these refs, Herb? They’re cheating!’‘’

An opposing coach once related how Magee would dress for games according to the opponent. A sweatsuit meant Herb wasn’t expecting that tough of a game. Seeing him in slacks meant you were moving up in his eyes.

The list of Magee assistants over the years is its own tale. Dick DeLaney was the longest tenured, before going on to 21 successful seasons in charge at West Chester. Dave Duda went on to coach Delaware Valley and Widener. Penn coach Steve Donahue was there for two seasons. St. Joseph’s coach Billy Lange spent two seasons there. Haverford College coach Steph Carideo, a former Jefferson women’s player, did a year under Magee. Reilly was the one Magee saw as his successor.

“I was on the staff at Providence in ‘87 that went to the Final Four with [Rick] Pitino,’’ said Sean Kearney, now the associate commissioner of the Atlantic 10. “Pitino took the Knicks job that summer and I moved back to Philly and was looking for something. I was working the O’Hara camp and Herb came to speak, as he always did. I literally had to chase him out to his car as I knew Coach DeLaney had left and taken the West Chester job. I was asking about the job and possibly interviewing and all. He basically said this is the interview and you got it.”

Those camps and clinics, another huge chapter of the Magee story.

“My first experience with Herb was when I was going into my freshman year at Archbishop Carroll High School,” said David Mauer, who went on to Textile. “I attended Barry Kirsch’s basketball camp. Charismatic as always, [Magee] emphasized shooting techniques. I still hold the ball the way he instructed. However, the trick at the end of his session was the best. He threw the ball through the rafters and bounced the ball into the net.”

» READ MORE: Herb Magee named 2022 NCAA President’s Pat Summitt Award recipient

Magee became this region’s shooting coach. He taught simple technique, shooting through the guide hand, with clinics and tapes and private sessions, with the occasional NBA client.

That through-the-rafters trick, Magee has a story, and then a story behind the story. Neither takes up a whole bus trip.

He began decades ago speaking at the Five Star camp in the Poconos, where Pitino and Hubie Brown and others made their names. Magee was up there one year speaking on shooting, naturally. He’d shoot throughout his lecture.

“I’m making every shot, literally,” Magee said.

The campers, lots of them all-American types, weren’t reacting. “If I do that at a normal camp, the kids are like, ‘Wow!’”

Magee saw a beam at the top of the ceiling, told the campers, here was something to win at PIG, the shooting contest. He tossed it through the rafters.

“Swish,” Magee said. “The place erupted.”

He adopted the trick. He’d pull up to the camp, kids would see him, “You’re the rafters guy.”

How he learned the trick, another story. Dolph Schayes, Naismith Hall of Famer, played for the Sixers from 1963 to 1966. They used to practice at Textile. Magee was just out of school, working as an assistant.

“Can you still play?” He remembers Schayes asking. “You want to jump in?”

After one of those sessions, Schayes, a 12-time NBA all-star, showed Magee the through-the-rafters trick.

“I started working on that,” Magee said. “I invented one for Carroll and O’Hara [clinics], it would go through the rafters and then bounce and go in. I wouldn’t make them all, but a pretty good percentage.”

When Magee went into the Naismith Hall of Fame in 2011, he remembers a conversation up in Springfield, Mass., with Schayes and Ramsay. Schayes related those old times in the Textile gym, how they’d play games of PIG and Schayes saying he’d win those games.

Nobody would question an all-time talent such as Dolph Schayes saying he’d won a game of one-on-one over almost anyone. But a shooting contest with Herb Magee?

“I doubt that, Dolph,” Ramsay told him.