Enter Gola, a 19-year-old freshman guard who had grown up just blocks from La Salle's north Philadelphia campus.
After La Salle's victory, Gola even appeared on Ed Sullivan's "Toast of the Town" show on national TV.
Two years after winning the NIT, La Salle won the NCAA title, and the Explorers reached the NCAA championship game again in 1955, Gola's senior season.
Over his 12 NBA seasons, including four with the Knicks, Gola was a consistently excellent player, though his career never reached the same heights it did at La Salle.
But that year marked a stark line of demarcation in the sport's evolution, as Gola and the Explorers lost to the University of San Francisco and its star, Bill Russell.
Standing 6 feet 6, with a shorter man's ability to dribble and pass and a willingness to play with toughness and unselfishness, Gola was sui generis in that era of basketball.
He remains the leading rebounder in NCAA history (2, 201), and for those of us from the region, it was Gola's loyalty to his school and hometown that we most treasured about him.
Near the narrowest point, which is just four metres wide, intrepid climbers tackle the notoriously tough Hotel Supramonte, a near-vertical limestone cliff which towers 400m above the Gola Su Gorropu and is one of the hardest climbs on the island.
Gola scored 22 points in La Salle's win over Dayton in the NIT title game at the Garden, capping a season in which he averaged 17.4 points and 17.1 rebounds and helped expand people's thinking about how basketball could be played.
He is 80 now, living in a nursing home in Philadelphia, and just last week, as this La Salle team was knocking off Boise State and upsetting Kansas State and beating Ole Miss in the final seconds, Jim Nantz and Marv Albert kept mentioning Tom Gola again and again, talking about who he was and why he mattered.
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