The final buzzer sounded in Spearfish, South Dakota, and CSU Pueblo’s season was over by a single point. Colorado Mesa had advanced and the Thunder Wolves were heading home, one basket short of the RMAC tournament final. For most players on that roster, it was the kind of loss that stings for a few weeks and then fades into the background of a life that moves on. For three of them, it was something else entirely. It was the last game they would ever play together.

This week, March Madness tips off across the country, and the spectacle it brings swallows everything else in the sports calendar. Brackets fill offices and group chats. Division I programs play out the climax of their seasons under national television lights. A division below all of that, in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference, a quieter version of the same story already concluded. But the story worth telling isn’t necessarily the one with the biggest audience.

Sam Howary, Landon Dvorsky, and Andon Mindrup are all from Colorado Springs, all seniors, and all members of the CSU Pueblo men’s basketball class of 2025. They have been friends since middle school. They played club ball together, went to high school together, and then, in a move that is increasingly unusual in college athletics, they all committed to the same university and played there for four consecutive years without any of them transferring. They call themselves the Trifecta.

The Trifecta didn’t form because someone ran a study. They formed the way most real friendships do, through proximity, repetition, and the particular bond that comes from competing alongside someone at an age when everything feels like it matters more than it probably does. But what they built, and what they chose to preserve through four difficult years of college, is exactly the kind of sustained peer connection that researchers point to when they talk about the long arc of a well-lived life.

It starts in a gym nobody remembers. Club ball, middle school, Colorado Springs. A lot of kids who play club sports go on to play in college, and some of them are good enough to earn a roster spot somewhere. But playing with the same people all the way through, from junior tournaments to college basketball, is genuinely uncommon. By the time players are weighing scholarship offers and portal decisions, the math of individual advancement almost always overrides the pull of shared history.

At higher levels of college athletics, it rarely happens at all. Scholarships create their own gravity. A player who can compete at Division I doesn’t stay at a Division II program out of loyalty, and a player who can earn a better offer elsewhere doesn’t usually turn it down to stay with friends. The incentive structure pushes everyone toward the best individual outcome, which is a reasonable and understandable thing to want. It just means that what Howary, Dvorsky, and Mindrup did is increasingly rare, and worth paying attention to.

Players who’ve spent years together on the court develop a kind of shorthand that’s difficult to teach and impossible to install in a preseason. You know where your guy is going before he knows he’s going there. That familiarity shows up in ways that don’t always appear in the box score, in the pass thrown to a spot before the cutter arrives, in the defensive rotation that happens a half-second faster because someone already knew what was coming. Coaches at the highest levels spend millions building systems designed to replicate what these three developed simply by growing up together.

Committing to CSU Pueblo made sense geographically since Colorado Springs to Pueblo is a short drive, and they were already connected. But what came after was harder than any of them expected. A previous coaching staff made things difficult, and the relationship with those coaches wore on all three of them. Dvorsky dealt with hip dysplasia. Mindrup had two knee surgeries. There were long stretches where playing time was thin and the whole enterprise felt more like endurance than development.

The transfer portal has made leaving easy, and plenty of players have done it for far less reason. The logic is almost always individual: what’s best for me, what level can I reach, what school offers a cleaner path forward. That calculation makes sense and it isn’t wrong. It’s just that it’s a single-person calculation, and what these three were doing was something different. They were making a group decision, one more year at a time, until four years had passed and they were seniors.