“I’ve just been really lucky, like, randomly meeting people,” Frank says.

And so when tourney time begins tomorrow on CBS, Frank’s investment will be personal.

Just like it was last year.

“John Lucas, before he moved to Texas, lived in Philadelphia,” says Frank of Oklahoma State’s star guard, who just may lead the No. 2 Cowboys to a possible Sweet Sixteen matchup against Shakur’s Wildcats. “I guarded John Lucas in our winter league basketball games all the time. And he was really small but just so incredibly quick. And then last year he hit the game-winner against St. Joe’s [to advance to the Final Four], which sucked.”

The stories, and Frank is full of them, are so ludicrous that you periodically question them. In the end, they are real because Philadelphia makes them possible. The City of Brotherly Love has produced NBA notables like two-time All-Star Rasheed Wallace (Simon Gratz High School) and Kobe Bryant (Lower Marion).

And then there’s Warrick.

“We would hang out, like, in the cafeteria,” Frank says. “My favorite [story] was my friend and I brought him to this three-on-three little suburban tournament.”

Long story short: “We won the tournament,” he laughs.

It wasn’t always so easy for Frank’s “really nice, really quiet” teammate. Virtually unwanted during his junior year at Friends Central—“Penn, Drexel, St. Joe’s, Villanova…none of them really recruited him,” Frank says—Warrick turned legendary Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim’s head as a late fill-in at a summer All-Star camp.

When N.C. State star Julius Hodge spurned Syracuse for the Wolfpack, Boeheim offered Warrick a spot at the last minute.

Before announcing his intentions to a gaggle of media, Warrick told his Friends teammates he was off to Syracuse.

“Coach wanted him to tell his extended family first,” Frank says.

Not long after, a Philadelphia TV News crew caught Warrick’s moves on tape.

“And he was doing the most amazing dunks ever,” Frank says. “And that’s when I knew like he could be…like he was doing 360s in high school!”

Unlike Warrick, Shakur was an early bloomer. Rated the No. 1 high school point guard in the country, Shakur attracted so much interest that Frank felt it.

“I guess the funniest thing is Jay Wright, the coach of [No. 5 seed Villanova],” Frank says. “He wanted Mustafa so badly that he let us practice in Villanova’s gym a couple of times. He knew all the players on our team by name. He came up to me and congratulated me for getting into Harvard. When I’d never seen him before. That’s how badly they wanted Mustafa.”

Frank encountered all the coaching legends—Hall of Famers Boeheim, Temple coach John Chaney, Arizona coach Lute Olsen—but was one of only a couple of players on the team who didn’t get a look. He drew interest from Susquehanna and Slippery Rock, he says, and Haverford and Swarthmore, “but I just decided I’d rather come here.”

And so tomorrow, Frank will find his web of Tournament loyalties even more complicated than most.

He’s definitely got it tough.

—Staff writer Alex McPhillips can be reached at rmcphill@fas.harvard.edu.