It was a short climb up the ladder for Tim Legler when he cut down the net at the Meadowlands following a win over Fordham in the 1988 Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference tournament championship.

And yet, in many ways, it also felt like the end of a very long climb.

After missing the NCAA tournament in his first three seasons at La Salle, Legler capped his college basketball experience by reaching the sport’s holy grail.

After a long and arduous journey, he finally got to go dancing.

“I vividly remember that last game in the MAAC tournament and cutting down the nets and how special that was,” said Legler, a former NBA guard, current ESPN analyst, and one of the La Salle basketball program’s most prominent alums. “Just cutting down the nets and knowing what meant – it meant we were going to the NCAA tournament.”

For Legler, that MAAC championship 25 years ago was special because it ended a four-year NCAA tourney drought for the Explorers and also kickstarted a five-year stretch in which La Salle, led by other future NBA players like Lionel Simmons, Doug Overton and Randy Woods, made the Big Dance four times.

But then, just as suddenly, it all came crumbling down.

La Salle, a proud program that won a national championship in 1954 and had played in the postseason 22 times, hasn’t been back in the NCAA tournament since 1992.

That’s a streak Legler and the rest of the school’s old guard of hoopsters hope will be snapped this week, as the Explorers enter the Atlantic 10 tournament with a healthy 21-8 overall record and an 11-5 regular-season mark in one of the nation’s deepest conferences.

“They kind of hit a dry spell for a while, so it’s nice when you’re amongst your peers and with guys you played with in the league to talk about your alma mater,” Legler said. “I used to always have to keep quiet. It’s nice to be able to speak up a little bit and talk about the quality wins we’ve had this year and our chance to make the tournament. It’s nice that the program is relevant again.”

Legler understands how the dry spell happened and is sympathetic to the program’s plight. La Salle switched its conference affiliation twice, first going to the Midwestern Collegiate Conference (now the Horizon League) before going to the Atlantic 10 in 1995-96.

Struggling to adapt to their new league, the Explorers didn’t crack the .500 mark in the A-10 until 2005-06 and didn’t make the postseason until last year when they qualified for the NIT.

“It’s tough,” Legler said. “College basketball is very cyclical. For a period of time there, they had a six, seven-year run of really high-level basketball because of the recruits they brought in. Sometimes you’re not able to replicate that. And they went to a better conference – a really tough conference – and that made it harder for them.

“It’s disappointing they were down for so long but it wasn’t shocking because it’s hard once you’re on the outside looking in to get back to that level.”

Legler also knows from experience that things can sometimes go awry. When he got to La Salle in the fall of 1984, the Explorers were nationally ranked in the preseason. But due to some bad luck and a key player being ruled ineligible, he said the team really underachieved during his first two years.

“Both years ended way too early for me,” Legler said, “and I was kind of deflated.”

Legler became even more deflated when La Salle head coach Lefty Ervin left the program following the 1985-86 season and was replaced by Speedy Morris. Morris would go on to do big things at La Salle but, at the time, Legler was put off by the fact that the man who recruited him was gone. The sharpshooting guard even considered transferring, before deciding to finish his college career in North Philly.

“I think I made the right choice,” he said.

Buoyed by the addition of Simmons, a highly touted freshman that Legler said “completed our team,” the Explorers made a deep run through the 1987 NIT, beating Big 5 rival Villanova on their way to the tourney finals.

“Any time you beat Villanova, it’s a good year,” Legler said. “You beat ’em twice in the same year and that’s pretty special – particularly when it ends their season.”

The Explorers lost in the NIT championship to Southern Miss, and Legler is still bothered that the Explorers turned the ball over in the final minute while trailing by two, instead of getting a shot off.

“We really should have been NIT champs that year,” he said.

Legler is equally bothered that La Salle got bounced out of the 1988 NCAA tournament in the first round, losing to a Mitch Richmond-led Kansas State team that would go on to the Elite Eight.

It would be the last game that the absurdly talented trio of Legler, Simmons and Overton, then a freshman, would play together.

“We gave them all they could handle,” Legler said. “I would like to go back to play that game one more time because I really feel like we had opportunities there.”

Despite the early exit from the 1988 Big Dance, Legler’s successful final two years at La Salle – he averaged 16.7 points per game as a senior – helped send him on his way to a prosperous career in the NBA, where he became one of the most accurate three-point shooters in league history. From there, he became one of ESPN’s top NBA analysts.

But he’s never forgotten his roots.

“We take great pride as La Salle guys trying to represent La Salle,” said Legler, who usually attends at least two Explorers games every year. “We bring it up whenever we get the opportunity on the air. It’s tough for me in what I do because not a lot of guys from La Salle are playing in the league. But any time I see a La Salle guy do something in a highlight, I make sure to do a shout out for La Salle.”

Perhaps if the Explorers have their name called on Selection Sunday, another on-air shout out will be in store. It would, after all, be the end of a very long climb back to the Big Dance for Legler’s alma mater.