The America East Basketball Tournament is here at Binghamton University for the second straight year. There will be players, coaches, scouts and fans from all over the northeast walking around our campus, eating Sodexho and spiedies and generally taking in all BU has to offer.

If there’s one thing we should be offering them, it’s a fight.

Not, of course, in terms of hospitality; let’s make these guys glad they picked BU to hold the tournament again. When we say we want a fight, we mean that the BU Zoo should be full of the loudest most ferocious Bearcats, for every game our team is in.

Here’s our chance to prove that we’re not as apathetic as we pride ourselves on being. With the eyes of a national audience on us, we can give BU’s reputation a face lift the likes of which University Communications and Marketing could only have wet dreams about.

How nice would it be to feel like we go to a real Division I school? A school with spirit, where people come out and tailgate at games of all of BU’s sports teams? Wouldn’t it be great to have the Events Center and the West Gym become as much of a “who’s who” of Binghamton as State Street is now?

It can be like that. It’s up to us to use the America East tourney as a turning point for our relationship with our school, and each other. Here’s an opportunity to crack the class-homework-alcohol-sleep paradigm and turn school socialization into something we do as a matter of course, not as an afterthought.

If the Bearcats play their cards right, they’ll be able to play against a super dynasty team like Duke on ESPN. Sure, they’ll likely get clobbered, but they’ll have at least made it to the big time. And anyone who’ll have been at the events Center this weekend will have been present for history in the making.