20 UK students invade Houston—and one generous alumnus’ home

Even with $25 student tickets, a trip to the Final Four can be expensive. Adding in gasoline, $200 hotel rooms, food and other costs, the trip to Houston could have really broken the bank for some students.
I was one of the fortunate ones.
They say the Big Blue Nation is wide reaching, but I really found out how much so when I was invited to stay at the home of UK alumnus Mike Engle and his wife Karen in Houston.
For free.
Along with 20 other college students, including their daughter Lauren.
My car, with four other people, arrived at the Engle home at 6 a.m. Central time Saturday, April 2, with brownies sitting on the counter and the offer to find a place to sleep on a floor space covered with air mattresses and sleeping students.  The next night, six of those students went to stay with a friend of the Engle family.
Saturday morning brought a home-cooked breakfast of biscuits and sausages monkey bread, courtesy of Karen Engle.
And on Sunday, when we were still licking our wounds from a heartbreaking loss to UConn, Lauren’s grandparents had a lunch of brisket, coleslaw and potato salad, with Blue Bell ice cream and a UK Final Four cake. They were just as disappointed as we were that they could only write Final Four with the icing, instead of national championship.
Mike Engle, who drives to his job at NASA in a UK blue truck and chats with a NASA security officer about UK basketball, arranged a tour of NASA for us all, including a peek into Mission Control. He majored in mechanical engineering at UK and was present when UK won the national championship in 1978. He didn’t begrudge us our lower-level student seating when he had a bird’s eye view in hopes of watching UK win another. (His national championship tickets became a gift to his pastor.)
They didn’t care we weren’t on their sleeping schedule. They tiptoed over bodies on their way to the kitchen. They gave up their bathroom access each morning so sweaty students could shower. And they didn’t ask a thing of us in return.
Sure, one bucket would have been the icing on the cake. Still, the kindness of UK fans hundreds of miles from the Bluegrass to students they don’t know is a sign of just how passionate the Big Blue Nation really is.