Don Donoher, the longtime Dayton basketball coach, was all class

That’s not why I asked The Washington Post to let me write about him — although it would have been a legitimate request.

Donoher — Mick or Mickey to his friends — was the first college basketball coach I met. I was 11. He and his wife, Sonia, who died in 2020 after 66 years of marriage — were friends I came to cherish long after his college coaching career ended in 1989.

If you are one of those people who rolls their eyes when I tell stories about how or why I came to know coaches, stop reading here.

My father was never much of a sports fan, but having gone to the City College of New York when it was still a big-time basketball school (before the betting scandals of the 1950s), he still had a warm spot for college hoops when I was growing up. He also had a friend named Fred Podesta, who was high up in the Madison Square Garden hierarchy and could get us really good seats.

Most of the time, I was on my own to buy Knicks and Rangers tickets and for regular season college basketball games. But during the NIT, when all games were played in Madison Square Garden, Dad would get tickets from Podesta and we would go, starting with the quarterfinals.

In 1968, when only 23 teams made the NCAA tournament, the NIT was still a big deal. The last team in that year was Dayton, which had struggled much of the season coming off its run to the national title game, where it lost to Lew Alcindor’s first UCLA team.

“We were lucky to lose that game by 15,” Donoher said years later. “Coach [John] Wooden backed off the last six minutes to let us make the score closer.”

Dayton had gotten to that game by beating North Carolina in the national semifinals, in Dean Smith’s first Final Four.

A year later, still a little bit hungover from the ecstasy of its run, Dayton started 6-9. An independent in those days, the Flyers had to win their last nine games to get into the NIT. In the quarterfinals, they met Fordham, one those New York teams I followed and rooted for. As I cheered on the Rams (loudly), my dad noticed three women sitting a few seats away from us who were pulling just as enthusiastically for Dayton.

“I’ll bet,” my dad said, “those are the Dayton coaches’ wives.”

When future Fordham athletic director Frank McLaughlin missed a jumper at the buzzer to allow Dayton to escape with a 61-60 win, I sat glumly waiting for the second game to start.

I looked up to see an attractive woman standing over me. My dad had been right. “I’m Sonia Donoher,”…