It’s been 10 years since La Salle was in the NCAA Sweet 16?

It’s been 10 years now? Somehow, yeah.

John Giannini still hasn’t looked back at full video of any of the NCAA Tournament games his La Salle Explorers won in 2013. Boise State in the play-in game in Dayton, an overnight plane ride with a dawn arrival in Kansas City for a game against Kansas State, two days after the play-in. Then the capper, taking out Mississippi on Tyrone Garland’s game-winner, immediately dubbed the Southwest Philly Floater on national television by Garland himself.

The coach isn’t tempted to run it all back?

“I have a fear about looking back at and frankly being disappointed in my coaching,” said Giannini, sitting in his office at Rowan, the school where he began his own head-coaching journey, where he is now the athletic director.

Who needs film when you see it all, point guard Tyreek Duren’s poise and Ramon Galloway’s energy leading a “perfect” leadership package, he said, with Sam Mills and Garland adding to what Giannini calls “highest level” quickness. Then adding two legit big guys in Jerrell Wright and Steve Zack, plus glue guys in D.J. Peterson and Rohan Brown.

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When Giannini mentions Jerrell Wright (a career 61% foul shooter) making 9 of 10 free throws against Kansas State, you don’t need a fact-checker. And for one of the last teams into the field … so many moments led to it all.

“I don’t know if you ever knew this — I knew we were in,” Giannini said.

Nope, I was in the room on Selection Sunday, trying to capture the scene for a column, purposefully looking at the head coach as the very last teams in the field were revealed.

“I had a guy on the committee,” Giannini said.

Really, he knew a guy who knew a guy.

“That morning, I called, ‘Man, what can you tell me?’ ‘I’ll call you back …’”

The call back: “I can’t tell you, but I think you’re going to be happy tonight.”

Not quite confirmation. CBS knew how to play out the drama for the teams really sweating it out. I’ve never been in a room with so much tension at one of these reveals. It had been 21 years since La Salle’s last NCAA bid. Did Giannini at least tell his wife?

“I don’t think I did — not even my staff,” Giannini said, since this was all unofficial and third-hand. “You’re waiting, all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘[Expletive!] maybe something went wrong.”

Nope, his players sprang out of their seats, actually blocking Giannini’s own view of La Salle’s name on the screen. When you’re barely in, so much contributes to that.

“Tyreek Duren makes a buzzer-beater at Northeastern early in the season to win,” Giannini said. “Steve Zack takes a charge at St. Bonaventure to win an overtime game. We needed all that to happen.”

All that and more. Giannini remembers talking to some local bracketologist named Lunardi about all the things he should root for that last Saturday to help, then sitting in his basement all day that Saturday before Selection Sunday. “My goodness, every game went our way.”

Lucky? Nah, that’s not the word when a school hadn’t heard its name on Selection Sunday for 21 years.

“Here’s the thing, you have to be really good and really lucky,” Giannini said from his 2023 perch. “And I never will apologize for lucky because I saw Rodney Green in his senior year go down with injuries. You’re going to have bad luck, so never apologize for the good luck when it comes.”

For Giannini himself, he knows exactly when the 2012-13 season began — on March 14, 2012.

“We lose in the NIT to Minnesota,” Giannini said. “I was really ticked because it was such a great opportunity. A home game, amazing crowd.”

So that night …

“Without exaggeration, the next season started by calling a Navy SEAL team commander from a McDonald’s drive-through at 11 at night after the Minnesota loss. … That year, all the teams we lost to were the big, physical, tough teams. Everyone beat us because of physical toughness.”

Credit Billy Lange, now St. Joseph’s head coach, a former Giannini player at Rowan, before Lange was Navy’s head coach, where he met the commander, Mark McGinnis, and struck up a friendship. After McGinnis talked to Lange’s team about his experiences in Iraq, Lange had McGinnis work a little more with his team, then had McGinnis join him at the 2011 Final Four in Houston.

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“He’s introducing me to every coach I can name, talking about what I did for his team,” McGinnis said over the phone this week.

One of the coaches was Giannini, who remembered, got the number from Lange, placed the call.

“My first paying customer,” said McGinnis, who now works with Duke and Texas and has NFL and PGA and LPGA clients.

“My sports psychology background — I’m a bit of a snob,” Giannini said. “I really dislike people who have pre-packaged programs. ‘I’m going to talk about bonding, or emotional control, or leadership.’ What if I don’t need that?”

The coach told the commander, “I want you to come and embed yourself and you tell us what you think we need.”

One offshoot: “He was the Ramon whisperer.”

Galloway, big-time all season, was the closest thing the Explorers had to an NBA player, and the talks the best player would have with this man who had been in combat were real and beneficial.

“He was supposed to come every month — then he just started coming more,” Giannini said.

One area: McGinnis worked on the team’s last five, he said, “to better push the middle five, growing the team’s abilities from the bottom up.”

McGinnis remembers an early lunch meeting at Chili’s on City Avenue, offering a full assessment. Since Giannini himself could get a bit maniacal, McGinnis veered into that territory, offering insights.

“He let me go, he let me go,” McGinnis said. “Then he said, ‘I really appreciate that insight, but you’re not here to work on me.’ I got it. I’ve been humbled. Remember, this is my first paying client.”

He’s got big clients now. This business envisioned by Lange has turned out to be real. But the 2013 La Salle Explorers won’t be shoved out of this career Navy man’s heart.

“You go to La Salle and you walk into Tom Gola and you walk in that locker room and their facilities — their gym, it’s not even as good as some high school programs,” McGinnis said.

Then he thinks of those players, from all sorts of backgrounds different from his own.

“It was the most amazing experience — these kids were open, they welcomed me,” McGinnis said. “I still have their numbers in my phone.”

The respect he had for Giannini, highest-level leadership, he said. McGinnis still thinks he got to Giannini one time. Butler game, late January. McGinnis remembers La Salle being up five, but Butler closing as Giannini called a timeout. McGinnis was on the bench, fully embedded.

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“At risk of life, limb and eyesight, I said, ‘Hey, if you want to win this game, you have to calm down,’” McGinnis said. “He looked at me. The look in his eye — I thought he was going to choke me. Then his eyes changed. He got in the huddle. He settled down.”

La Salle won the game, went to VCU and won down there, getting to 14-5, which is a lot different from 12-7 if they’d lose that tough pair. The affection and respect between the coach and the Navy man remains to this day. Giannini keeps a paddle in his office given to him by McGinnis.

“I’ll never forget, when we went into the tournament, [McGinnis said] the whole thing, what you have to understand, there’s nothing impromptu with the Navy SEALs. We just follow our training. Like if Y happens, we do X,” Giannini said. “It became a mantra for us. Just follow our training. Like our defensive fundamentals. We weren’t big on adjusting to scouting reports because we felt like our package could address things.”

For 10 years now, Giannini has taken calls from coaches going to the play-in game, how to handle it.

“Who wants to play in the play-in game?” Giannini said. “I tell everyone, it’s a huge positive. For this reason: That game, you’re nervous. If you win that game, you’re so comfortable and confident in the next one, and the other team is the uptight one. … It really helped us. We jumped out to leads in both games [against Kansas State and Ole Miss.] All the jitters were out.”

A late-season injury to Zack, putting La Salle down a big man, that really concerned Giannini. He knew a loaded Atlantic 10 had prepared his team for NCAA competition.

“But we’re not an NCAA Tournament team without Steve Zack,” Giannini said of Zack’s contributions all season. “He was one of the best rebounders and defenders in the league. In the office, after Steve got hurt, I told our staff, we’re in big trouble.”

Nobody told the players that. Certainly, nobody ever told Rohan Brown that.

“The surprise was, Rohan Brown played really significant minutes in the NCAA Tournament and did a really good job,” Giannini said of the 6-foot-6 freshman.

“You know who I absolutely loved like a son was Rohan Brown,” McGinnis said in a separate conversation. “I used to tell him, ‘If anybody on this team could be a Navy SEAL, it’s you.’”

One of the SEAL team man’s other big takeaways was how calm Giannini stayed during March.

“If he’s not self-aware enough — but he’s got it,” McGinnis said of the man in charge and his demeanor.

Maybe 10-year anniversaries hit a sweet spot of “No, it can’t be.” Five years, sure, still close; 25 years ago — yeah, it’s been a while.

La Salle’s run in 2013 hits another sweet spot, of improbability. What’s more surprising? La Salle’s winning three games in the 2013 NCAA Tournament or Villanova’s winning six and the whole thing in 2016 and again in 2018?

During the run, Giannini said, he never stopped to enjoy it. Except before moving on to the Sweet 16 and a date with Wichita State, which turned out to be too high a mountain out in Los Angeles, Giannini said he did walk out to the empty arena with assistant Horace “Pappy” Owens after the Ole Miss news conferences, “just us alone in this cavernous gigantic place. I said, ‘Not bad for an AAU guy and a DIII coach, is it?’”

Nope, Giannini still isn’t tempted to sit down and watch it all again.

“I’ve got the pictures in my head,” Giannini said, “and I kind of don’t want to let reality interfere with that.”