Philadelphia | What Rocks

PASSION DOESN'T come any purer than at Philadelphia college basketball games. You read about the frenzied, manic atmosphere any time the city teams play each other, and after a while your eyes kind of glaze over the copy. And then you go the Palestra and you sit on one of the backless benches and you encounter a thunder you never knew existed. Even if the teams on the floor are sleepwalking through their respective seasons, they play these games as if a Final Four berth were at stake. Their fans -- students, alumni, pep band, cheerleaders -- act the same way. My senior year at Saint Joseph's, back before the renaissance of the last decade, the Hawks were going nowhere, but somehow they had strung together a good Big 5 season, and in their last City Series game, they downed La Salle to capture the crown. I was an editor at the student paper, and we ran a banner headline on the front page reading, "WE WIN!" Nobody felt it was inappropriate.