MADISON — They sat on the side of I-90 still hoping to get to the Kohl Center.
They wouldn’t be there for the start of the Aquinas High School boys basketball team’s WIAA Division 4 championship game against Bonduel, but they’d be there at some point to add to the atmosphere for the Blugolds.
Word had leaked to the players that the band encountered some travel troubles. The student section reacted with enthusiasm when Jack Neumeister and Louie Berendes arrived to join them with gear in tow for their contribution to the Blugolds’ 74-45 victory on Saturday.
“We left school about 9:30 (a.m.), and about 30 minutes before (the bus) broke down, me and Louie were looking at each other and saying, ‘Can you smell that?'” Neumeister said. “It smelled like burning head gaskets and not good diesel stuff.”
The ride in that vehicle ended around the Wisconsin Dells point before another one was called to finish the trip with the rest of the band. But Neumeister (guitar), Berendes (drums) and Matthew Rabindra (keyboards) were in too much of a rush to wait.
Berendes’ parents, Chuck and Polly, were also driving to Madison but hit the road a little later.
“My mom saw my phone location and asked if we were broken down,” Berendes said. “I told her we were, and they pulled up behind us when they got there.
“We loaded my stuff and Jack’s stuff up in the Suburban, came straight here and set up.”
Neumeister and Berendes were the first to arrive and cranked out their first Black Sabbath tune as soon as the opportunity arose. With the Berendes vehicle full, Rabindra and his gear had to find another way to the Kohl and enlisted the help of an Uber driver.
“We got the Uber, but there was an overpass near where we were, and there was no exit there,” he said. “They had to go all around the exit to get to us, and it took an extra 20 minutes. I got in with my keyboard, and we got here at halftime.”
Junior Finley Strom and sophomore Calvin Bahr, not surprisingly, were focused on the game during these arrivals, but they heard their classmates playing their Black Sabbath and Green Day songs during the second half.
“We were concentrating on the game,” Strom said, “but we heard them, and we were glad they were here.”
