You see, wherever Alexander goes, a piece of Catawba goes with him. And Alexander, coach of the South Carolina State Bulldogs, always seems to have his Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference champs in this tournament.

“Catawba’s a big part of me,” says Alexander, a tall, lean man whose 16th-seeded Cinderella squad will take on the South Region’s top dog, Stanford, in Birmingham. “Catawba’s where I grew up. It’s where I became a man. The things that Sam Moir taught me when I played, they’re still with me.”

Alexander is the last coach to step on the stage at Wednesday’s press conferences.

When Stanford coach Mike Montgomery and his star players, Mark Madsden and Casey Jacobsen held court, there were 100 reporters in the audience. For Alexander, there are six.

But Cy has style. While other coaches during the day have hemmed and hawed about game plans — most of the coaches (yawn) are going to take them one game at a time — and matchups, Alexander doesn’t mince words.

He tells the world exactly how he’s going to slay the Stanford Goliath.

“We’ll play’em same way we beat Clemson this year,” says Alexander. “We’ll pack it in the paint and hope they miss 3s. I’m not saying Clemson is as talented as Stanford, but they have the same sort of size. They’ll have the advantage on the block.”

Alexander doesn’t mind revealing his strategy early, because he has nothing to lose.

The MEAC gets precious little respect and is never expected to make a racket in the brackets. So the league always gets a No. 16 seed and an early out against a powerhouse.

“I’d hoped for a 15 this year,” says Alexander. “I thought we deserved it.”

Alexander says his case was damaged last year when Florida A&M’s Rattlers upset his team in the MEAC Tournament and won the right to play punching bag for Duke in the first round of the East Regional in Charlotte.

“We’d just beaten A&M by 25 points a week earlier. They were our league’s No. 7 seed and then they knock us off in the tournament. We watched them play Duke, and knew it should have been us.”

But this season, the Bulldogs took care of business in the league tourney. They blew out everyone.

“The loss to A&M was a motivator all season,” Alexander says. “Now, the weight of the world is off our shoulders. We are redeemed.”

The big question now is how much longer Alexander will remain at S.C. State, a school in Orangeburg with roughly 5,000 students.

When reporters ask him if he’s ready to move on, he candidly answers, “Yes. And I know my name is out there.”

It should be out there. Alexander is in the NCAA Tournament for the fourth time and the third time in five years. He’s won five MEAC regular season crowns and four tournament championships. In 13 years with the Bulldogs, Alexander has won 223 games.

At this tournament, Alexander has been talked about as a potential hiree at American University.

“I’d be interested,” says Alexander.

But then again, he’s been on the list of finalists for big-time jobs before.

He was on the short list at Ohio State in ‘89, at Old Dominion in ‘94 and at Southern Illinois last season.

“I’ve been reasonably successful and would like a chance,” Alexander says.

Maybe his team can stun Stanford and the world today. That would be just the thing to cap off Alexander’s resume. Then he would be Alexander the Great.

“We’ve played Duke and Maryland,” says Alexander. “We’re not afraid. We can play with Stanford, too. We just can’t get off to the sort of start we did against Oregon State this season. In that one, we got down 25-0, before we started to play.”

Don’t look for a repeat of that disaster today. The Bulldogs who have accompanied Alexander, don’t look intimidated.

“Games, fortunately, are still played on the court, not in the newspapers,” says Alexander’s unlikely star, a transfer from the Fashion Institute of Technology, named Mike Wiatre.

But the Bulldogs have had their 15 minutes in the spotlight. And now, Alexander leaves the stage.

That’s when he gets a chance to talke about Salisbury. He talks about how much he’ll miss old Tribe teammate Charles Linn, who passed away earlier this year, and how wonderful it is whenever he reunites with old Indian comrades like James Brown and Mike Mayhew.

“I still follow Catawba,” he says. “Every game.”

And today, Salisbury will follow one of its own as he tries to pull off a water-into-wine sort of miracle.