A message in the Fighting Maroons’ group chat from a year ago helped set the tone for their run to the UAAP Season 87 championship.
Sometime in the second week of December 2023, or shortly after the UP Fighting Maroons lost the UAAP Season 86 men’s basketball crown in heartbreaking fashion to the De La Salle Archers, the team’s group chat — composed of players, coaches, and team management — lit up with a lengthy message.
It was from Francis Lopez, the freshman sensation who had quickly established himself in the rotation of coach Goldwin Monteverde. Lopez was barely out of his teens, yet his message to the rest of the team showed wisdom beyond his years.
Lopez started the message by thanking everyone on the team, before reminding them all that “life goes on.” He had come to Diliman earlier in the year in January to much fanfare after seemingly headed to Ateneo. Lopez lived up to the hype in Season 86, snagging Rookie of the Year honors and helping lead the Fighting Maroons to their third straight finals appearance.
UP held a seven-point lead in the fourth quarter and were just a couple of defensive stops away from icing the game and a second title in three seasons, but were unable to close it out. To say that the whole team was shellshocked would be an understatement, as Lopez himself observed.
“I saw each and [every one’s] reaction after that buzzer including the coaches,” he said in the message. “I felt pain. In life we can’t go back to what has been done already, what we can do is learn from this experience.”
Then, in words that would prove prophetic, Lopez declared that the Fighting Maroons’ time would come.
“Ang sinasabi talaga hindi para sa atin pero darating din yung para sayo,” he wrote. “This doesn’t define who we are….Thank you coaches and players again for everything but this doesn’t end. We fight back, we do it all together. Being completely honest hindi sapat satin ang silver because I know each and everybody here aren’t build for that. At the end of the day, like Coach Gold said, we are still a family here and let’s be back stronger.”
Bo Perasol, director of the UP Office for Athletics and Sports Development (OASD), told The GAME that Lopez’s message resonated with everyone on the group chat, simply because the young forward rarely speaks his mind and lets others do the leading. So when he had something to say, everyone’s ears perked up.
“He’s a quiet kid,” Perasol said of Lopez. “Not really prone to letting his emotions out. He’s very quiet. It’s also the reason why he thinks a lot. He thinks about how he feels. He’s in tune with his feelings.
“And when he speaks and when he shares his message, of course, everybody else would listen because he doesn’t speak most of the time. That’s why it was a good message coming from him.”
He was also hurting terribly from the Game 3 collapse. “Francis took the loss particularly hard,” one member of the UP coaching staff told The GAME.
For Perasol, though, Lopez’s message was just an amplification of what everyone was feeling after that crushing Game 3 loss: it hurts, but we’re not done yet. And yes, life goes on.
“They would agree with Francis’ statement that we have to move on. They know that. But at the heart of each one, they also know that regardless of whether Francis said it or not, they will do it.
“That’s the kind of character of our players. They’re used to winning. They know what they have to do.”
‘No space for second place’
UP’s redemption tour began almost immediately after Season 86 ended, and was fueled by a mantra built around the belief that another runner-up finish would simply be unacceptable. It was a battle cry embraced by everyone.
“Including the training camps abroad or our games here when we started there was really no space for second place,” Perasol said. “We all wanted to get back and the message actually is that we want to do this because we all know that we can.”
During their offseason build-up, the Fighting Maroons performed like men on a mission. They went undefeated in tune-up and preseason tournament games, including a sweep of the FilOil tournament where they beat the Green Archers twice.
The team only tasted defeat in Korea, when they were without a mourning coach Goldwin Monteverde, who lost both his parents in a span of one week. They then flew to Taiwan, where they again swept a tournament.
“Alam namin na kaya namin yan,” Perasol said. “So going into the season the confidence was really high, the belief that we can do this was really high.”
The Fighting Maroons opened Season 87 with six straight wins. They were looking good, and they were feeling good.
Then came the much-awaited grudge match against the defending champions to close out the first round. The Green Archers sent a statement, leading by as many as 20 points in a comfortable 12-point victory that reminded the Fighting Maroons that the path to redemption still went through Taft Avenue. Never mind that JD Cagulangan missed the game due to injury; the Green Archers simply got into their heads.
The loss to DLSU triggered a rough stretch that saw UP go 3-3. The NU Bulldogs handed them their worst defeat of the season, a 20-point shellacking that was painful to watch. Three games later, the Green Archers reasserted their mastery over the Fighting Maroons in another double-digit win. This time, UP was without prized center Quentin Millora-Brown, but regardless, a third loss in six games was enough to trigger some alarm bells, and for the first time in the redemption tour, some doubt began to creep into the minds of the Maroons.
“Nagkakaroon ka ng doubts, when you get to have losses. Kahit sinabi mong kulang-kulang ka, tinalo ka ng La Salle. Alam mo na you’re vulnerable at some point and you start asking questions about what you are trying to do as a team, yung system ninyo, what kind of adjustments are you going to do? So even up to the end, you all know that you can win but you’re not sure about it. Alam mo na kaya ito but it can go the other way around also, na kaya din tayo ng La Salle.”
The Fighting Maroons had now lost four straight to the one team that stood in their way of a championship. Suddenly, all that preseason swagger was missing.
“Our two losses against La Salle, iyon ang nagbigay ng duda,” Perasol admitted. “Because we all know na iyon ang kalaban.”
Luckily for the Fighting Maroons, they rediscovered their mojo when it mattered the most.
The ‘Gold’ standard
In the press conference after the UP Fighting Maroons somehow frittered away a chance at closing out the DLSU Green Archers in Game 2 of their Season 87 finals series, Goldwin Monteverde was asked how his team could bounce back from such an incredibly frustrating loss.
In a déjà vu moment, the Fighting Maroons had once again blown a fourth-quarter lead in the finals against La Salle, and Lopez contributed heavily to their downfall with four straight missed free throws in the last minute of a 76-75 defeat.
Monteverde, though, didn’t seem too bothered.
“Yung mga ganon naman na missed free throws or missed shots, it’s all part of the game. We did our best to try to execute naman what we want offensively, eh ganoon naman talaga basketball eh, it’s either miss or make lang yan,” said the always calm Monteverde, who can be more stone-faced than the Oblation.
“I guess ‘yung reality is life goes on. Ganun naman talaga ‘yung buhay na kung minsan it will go your way or it would not. Ang importante kung ano ‘yung ginagawa mo to achieve ‘yung gusto mong gawin.”
“Life goes on.” Those three words were at the core of Francis Lopez’s message to the team in December 2023 after that crushing loss to La Salle, and a year later Goldwin Monteverde was mouthing those very same words following a similar loss. It was this mindset that brought the team back once again to the finals, and now, with another potential Game 3 loss weighing heavily over their heads, it was what they had to hang on to if they hoped to erase the stigma of Game 2.
Perasol, though, was concerned that seeds of doubt had been planted again in the heads of the players, especially since over the first two games the series had so far gone the same way as it had in the two previous seasons.
“Iyon iyong mabigat sa lahat,” Perasol noted. “It rewound everything that happened in the previous seasons. It’s not even about just the game. It broke that confidence and reminded everyone that ito na naman.Nangyayari na naman.
“Kahit na sabihin mong close iyon, it took a lot from our boys, iyong ganoong talo. Mabigat iyong Game 2. Iyong kumpiyansa mo just eroded. It just eroded kasi na-remind ka sa vulnerability mo sa particular team na iyan.”
Against this backdrop, Goldwin Monteverde kept his team together by reminding them how they got here in the first place. Those who really know him will tell you that Monteverde is not an emotional coach. He’s not the type to give a fiery locker room speech before a big game.
“Wala, wala,” Perasol said when asked about it. “Hindi siya ganun. Minsan siya pa ang makikiusap sa akin na ‘Coach (Bo), kausapin mo iyong team.’”
What Monteverde does believe in is sticking to the system that got you here, in preparing for each game in a meticulous fashion and for all possible scenarios, and in believing in one another.
So before the winner-take-all Game 3, there were no speeches a la Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday in the UP locker room. There was only the quiet confidence and the belief instilled in the players to trust the process.
“The coaches, especially Coach Gold, he created this as something that has to be consistent and has to be the same regardless of the situation,” Perasol explained. “It’s not, ‘Talo tayo, last game na ito, lalaban tayo!’
“It’s not like that. Coach Gold is not like that. His leadership is not like that. His leadership is, he showed everyone else that our work is going to make the difference in the end.”
For a while, Game 3 threatened to go the same way as Season 86’s Game 3: the Fighting Maroons were in control in the second half, before Kevin Quiambao willed his team back into the contest.
Early in the fourth quarter, the scoreboard read 58-58. It was anybody’s championship to win. In the end, while they did stick to the system, the Fighting Maroons won it by simply living up to their moniker.
“Sobrang cliché, pero we won because we really wanted it more,” said the anonymous member of the coaching staff. “Game 3 showed that.”
In the days that followed the Season 87 championship, the players and coaches were feted left and right by a grateful university and its alumni. They deserved every bit of praise, no doubt. But once the euphoria had died down, reality slowly set in.
Cagulangan announced he was headed to Korea. One-and-done wonder Millora-Brown was flying back to the States for a while to ponder his next basketball move. And Perasol recently declared that there would be no foreign trip for the team, as the remaining players had to catch up on their academics.
Once again, for the new UAAP men’s basketball champions, life goes on.
Banner Images from Kieran Punay/KLIQ Inc.