The bus should have left already.
Security personnel were clearing pathways outside SM Mall of Asia Arena while confetti still clung stubbornly to kneepads, socks, and warmup jackets. Nearly an hour had passed since the championship ceremony ended, yet thousands of La Salle fans still crowded the barricades outside the arena.
Voices were gone. Phones were still raised anyway.
Some supporters pressed jerseys over the railings hoping for signatures. Others simply wanted one final glimpse of the athletes who had carried green-and-white back to the top of the UAAP mountain.
The engine was already running when the Lady Spikers noticed another cluster of fans waiting near the far end of the driveway — still screaming, still waving, still refusing to leave.
So the players climbed back down from the bus.
Again.
More selfies. More autographs. More time.
Maybe that was the perfect image for Season 88 because this was never only about championships.
It was about stewardship.
About athletes who understood what it meant to carry De La Salle University on their backs.
La Salle has never lacked legends.
There was Lim Eng Beng erupting for 37 points against Ateneo in the 1974 NCAA championship game — the kind of performance older La Sallians still talk about like inherited folklore.
There was Yan Lariba transforming table tennis into a green-and-white dynasty before eventually representing the Philippines in the 2016 Rio Olympics.
But greatness usually arrives one era at a time.
Season 88 felt different.
This time, it all arrived together.
Michael Phillips.
Shevana Laput.
Angel Canino.
Amie Provido.
Lyka De Leon.
And what made them unforgettable was not dominance alone.
It was what happened after disappointment.
UP ripped the basketball championship away from Taft. NU built a wall around women’s volleyball and dared La Salle to break through it. Those Season 87 losses lingered because at schools like La Salle, defeat never disappears quietly. It follows players into offseason workouts, empty shooting gyms, film sessions, and long summer nights where failures replay themselves possession by possession.
So when Season 88 arrived, neither team looked wounded.
They looked sharpened.
Mission-driven.
After the opening win of the volleyball season, Shevana Laput delivered the kind of quote athletes usually avoid unless they are absolutely certain.
“We are here with a purpose,” she said.
“And that purpose is to win a championship.”
Bold declarations are easy in sports.
Surviving them is harder.
But the Lady Spikers never flinched from the pressure attached to those words. Over the course of the season, they turned matches into slow suffocation.
An Angel Canino dig extending a rally that should have ended already.
A Lyka De Leon save somehow scraping inches above the floor.
An Amie Provido read arriving before hitters fully committed to the angle.
Then Laput descending from the wing with that long, violent swing that seemed to pull the air out of entire arenas.
Opponents occasionally survived the first wave.
Rarely the second.
By season’s end, La Salle had scored 1,212 points while allowing only 983. But statistics alone could not explain what made the Lady Spikers terrifying.
Even while trailing, they never carried panic.
And because they never panicked, neither did the Green Nation.
The basketball team imposed itself differently.
Where the Lady Spikers suffocated opponents slowly, the Green Archers arrived like blunt-force trauma, and nobody embodied that identity more completely than Michael Phillips.
Most stars glide through games.
Phillips detonated inside them.
Loose balls bent toward him. Rebounds became wrestling matches. Every defensive rotation felt urgent, almost personal. He chased possessions with the energy of someone offended that the other team believed it deserved the basketball too.
And in the Finals victory that finally exorcised the ghosts from Diliman, he delivered the kind of performance that permanently welds itself into school memory:
25 points.
18 rebounds.
Bodies on the floor.
Chaos under the rim.
UP tried turning the championship into survival basketball. Phillips responded by sprinting harder. Diving harder. Crashing harder.
As if exhaustion itself were an insult.
But what ultimately separated these athletes from ordinary champions had little to do with trophies.
It was gratitude.
After winning the basketball championship, amid all the screaming and confetti, Michael Phillips grabbed the microphone and shouted:
“God did.”
That was his first instinct.
Not self-celebration.
Not mythology.
Gratitude.
The Lady Spikers carried themselves the same way. Even after becoming full-blown celebrities within Philippine volleyball, nearly every interview circled back toward appreciation — coaches, teammates, trainers, the program, the community that carried them long before the championships arrived.
There was no manufactured swagger to it. No performance.
Just athletes who seemed deeply aware that La Salle was never something they individually built, only something they were temporarily entrusted to protect.
And maybe nothing captured that spirit more clearly than the decision several Lady Spikers eventually made about their final playing year.
Because the easy choice would have been leaving.
Professional careers overseas were already waiting. Their legacies were already secure.
Instead, they chose La Salle.
Together.
And when Amie Provido explained why, she revealed the emotional center of the entire season. The veterans remembered what it felt like being pushed into enormous pressure too early after previous leaders departed, and they refused to let the younger Lady Spikers inherit that same chaos alone.
When it was Angel Canino’s turn to share why, “mahal ko ang La Salle”, while recalling a four-year-old promise the young Angel made to old De La Salle when she first set foot in Taft – “I will play all my five years here”.
That is the part people will remember years from now.
Not just the championships.
Not just the confetti.
Not even the revenge against UP and NU.
They stayed.
Programs survive on talent.
Dynasties survive on inheritance — older players teaching younger ones how pressure is supposed to feel while wearing green, teaching them that La Salle jerseys are never truly owned.
They are borrowed.
Passed carefully between generations like family heirlooms expected to return without scratches.
Maybe that is why Season 88 struck the Green Nation differently.
The titles mattered.
Of course they mattered.
But championships alone do not make athletes immortal in Taft. The unforgettable ones leave behind something heavier than trophies.
A standard.
And long after the lights inside MOA Arena dimmed, La Salle fans were still waiting outside for one final moment with their champions.
So the players climbed back down from the bus to meet them.
Again.
Season 88 was never really about athletes just winning titles.
It was about a generation that kept choosing La Salle.
Every
Single
Time
ANIMO LA SALLE!!!
