The Niagara University women's basketball team lost their game Monday night but ran into an even tougher opponent on the way home back to Western New York — the polar vortex and a record-setting snowstorm.
The team, on its way back from Pittsburgh, got stranded on their bus for nearly 30 hours on the New York Thruway Monday night in a storm that dumped some four feet of
snow around Buffalo, the Daily Record reported.
"We all went to bed, we woke up, and we were still in the same spot," team member Sam Lapszynski told the newspaper. "Nobody knew it was going to be this long. It's literally just white outside. You can't see anything at all more than a few feet away."
With not much to do and seemingly hours to do it, the basketball team did what bored college students would do on a bus with a hot WiFi link going: They started to live tweeting the experience.
The tweets caught the attention of Michael Wooten, anchor of WGRZ-TV in Buffalo, New York, whose retweet was then circulated more than 300 times.
After nearly 30 hours on the bus, the team happily reported that it was being "rescued" early Wednesday.
The New York Daily News reported that state troopers picked the team up and transported them to a nearby police station where another bus was waiting to take them back to campus.
"We're very lucky," Lapszynski told the Daily Record. "We got the good end of the stick . . . When we looked at the weather on our phones, it said 100 percent chance of snow for as long as our phones can tell us. It doesn't show any signs of stopping any time soon."
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