For a moment, just a brief moment, the thought hit me—”Haven’t I been here before?”

No. That’s impossible. After all, Friday’s press conference was the first time I had seen Athletic Director Gerald O’Dell walk to a microphone-strewn podium. And it was the first time in several years that a large crowd had assembled at Chick Evans Field House for any occasion. It was also the first time O’Dell has hired Jim Molinari as the men’s basketball coach at NIU.

So why did I get this feeling? I just couldn’t figure it out.

An enthusiastic O’Dell stepped to the microphones and talked about what a pleasure it was to see all the people at the get-together. As he talked, I glanced down at one of the press releases about Molinari that was handed out at the door.

“The reason we selected Jim,” the release quoted O’Dell, “is the fact that he has great integrity.” Whoa, there was that feeling again. Now starting to tremble, I read on, “He comes from an established Top 20 program. He is a key player in the Division I arena.”

For some unknown reason, I was now in a cold sweat. Compelled to keep reading, I looked at a blue release that showed Molinari’s career record as an 11-year ASSISTANT AT A STRONG DIVISION I PROGRAM—DePaul. Those words blew me away.

“Right now, we’re an independent,” Molinari said in another release. “We just want to be the best independent possible.” I frantically flipped the release over and saw the words, “I have a strong preference to play an uptempo style, a transition game … We’ll do some pressure defense, some traps, but the strength and success of any basketball team is a strong man-to-man defense.”

My head was now spinning and I was beginning to feel like Jimmy Stewart in “Vertigo.” O’Dell continued to speak, his words now fading, as I slumped over in my chair and saw what appeared to be the words “DePaul” and “Iowa” darting through my head. Those words were followed by “Meyer” and, I think, “Olson.” I wasn’t sure about the Olson part because it looked like it was preceded by the word “Lute.” I figured I must be losing my mind.

In too much of a daze to continue reading the releases, I gathered myself and tried to focus again on what O’Dell was saying.

I regained my senses in time to catch this O’Dell analogy—”You have a dog sled team up there, right. We are the Huskies.”

This was now a full-fledged nightmare.

He continued, “You have a pack of dogs. They pull that sled and there’s some rough sledding and there’s some smooth sledding. Who do you want that person to be—to be the lead dog? That person is Jim …”

That was it—the missing piece. All of a sudden I understood the feeling. It was all a bad case of “deja vu all over again.” (You knew the moral to this story had to be a Yogi Berra cliche.)

I took the name “Rosborough” and started inserting it everywhere I saw “Molinari” in the releases. “Iowa” replaced “DePaul” and “Lute (yes, Lute) Olson,” Rosborough’s boss at Iowa, replaced “Joey Meyer.”

The puzzle was complete. In Molinari, NIU had hired someone with the same type of coaching style, the same type of assistant coaching background, the same type of respected references on the resume, the same type of emphasis on defense and academics and even someone with the same type of first name as Rosborough, who was hired by NIU three years ago. The Huskies had hired a mirror-image of the person they fired.

And I thought I was confused.