ROCK HILL, S.C. It was one of the saddest days of his life, one of the saddest in recent college basketball history, but Pat Kelsey will talk about it. He'll talk about it openly, eagerly, thoroughly even without being asked. He mentions every heartbreaking detail, including the part where he got into the driver's seat of an ambulance and moved it in front of the Wake Forest basketball offices in the vain hope that he could do something, anything, to help. He couldn't. His mentor, boss, father figure, former coach, Skip Prosser, was gone at age 56.

It was five years ago Thursday.

Kelsey, 37, wants to talk about it. He points to the couch in his coach's office at Winthrop University, reliving the moment. Let's say that's where Coach was sitting when it happened, he says. Prosser was just back from a run and was wearing his ratty yellow shorts. He loved old clothes. He had an opened newspaper on his face, and Kelsey never will forget the color of that face. It was blue.

Kelsey wasn't the first to find him. But Kelsey was close behind. He remembers what people said. First, "Where's Mr. Prosser?" Then, "Call 911!" Then, "Hurry! Hurry!" Then, "It's not good, Kels. Not good, Kels."

He remembers the paramedics saying they would do everything they could, which he knew was code for "There's nothing we can do." Driving the ambulance probably was illegal, and definitely useless, but Kelsey would do anything and everything to keep Skip Prosser alive.

And that's why Kelsey is talking about the day he died. He does it without reluctance or anger because Mark Prosser (left) and Pat Kelsey have a special bond. (Eric Adelson)that's part of his mission now, five years later. He needs to keep this man alive.

Even though doing so nearly cost him his own career.

"The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

Skip Prosser loved that saying. Thomas Payne wrote it in 1776, about those who fought for the American cause only during the good times. Prosser had no use for summer soldiers or sunshine patriots, and that message got through to Pat Kelsey even when he was a young director of basketball operations at Wake Forest.

Kelsey is a Cincinnati boy, the son of a car salesman who taught him how to think creatively until it hurt, smile until it hurt and work until it hurt. It was some sort of miracle that Kelsey found a coach and leader who had the same belief system.

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Skip Prosser's son, Mark, and protégé Pat Kelsey carry on his coaching tradition at Winthrop