I was covering Fresno State men's basketball at the time. I walked through a back door in the North Gym, near the basketball office, and there, standing by himself in the hallway, was assistant coach/recruiting coordinator Charles Fisher. He had a stunned look, a faraway stare.

“He’s gone,” Fisher said.

“Who?”

“Gary,” said Fisher. “He’s not coach anymore.”

A few hours later, Gary Colson announced he was resigning after five years as Fresno State men’s basketball coach and would take a new job as an assistant to then-athletic director Gary Cunningham. Colson, only weeks from his 61st birthday, cited the mental and physical strain of being a Division I basketball coach.

Even in that pre-Internet, pre-text-messaging era, all of metropolitan Fresno seemed to explode at once. Tarkmania hit with a force matched in intensity only by the 1983 NIT title, the 1992 Freedom Bowl victory over USC and the baseball team’s national championship in 2008.

But Tarkmania, unlike those other thrills, didn’t dissipate after a few days. It didn’t die three weeks later when Jerry Tarkanian was hired to replace Colson. It didn’t die when Tarkanian himself resigned nearly seven years later. For many Bulldogs fans, it still hasn’t died.

For sustained passion and immense dreams and unwavering fan loyalty, nothing in the history of Fresno State athletics compares to Tarkmania.

The unfulfilled expectations were of an unprecedented scale, too.

It all began that day Gary Colson said it was time to move on and Charles Fisher saw his life change.

March 15, 1995.

Keep that date in mind. It’s one of two pivotal dates spotlighting the unique pressures that converged to make the administration of Fresno State athletics from 2001 through 2005 a challenge unlike anything ever faced by any other school in NCAA history.