In a sport where Job 1 is to look out for Number 1, and loyalty is harder to find these days than a player wearing Chuck Taylor high tops, I found a little miracle amid all the madness of March.

This is the story of two college hoops junkies that have had each other’s back, through thick and thin, love and death, for 25 years.

“My problem,” tough-as-nails Texas A&M coach Buzz Williams sarcastically quipped Thursday night, “is I’m too loyal.”

But ask what Dale Layer, his basketball bestie, has meant to him, and you can watch Williams choke back sincere tears of gratitude.

“When he speaks to me, I don’t move and I listen with both eyes,” Williams said, “because he’s only going to say something that impacts winning.”

During an 80-71 victory over Yale, Williams marched and stomped, encouraged and implored for at least 20,000 steps on the sideline, while Layer sat quietly behind him in the lead seat on the Texas A&M bench, charting and taking notes as meticulously as a research scientist in the lab.

“Basketball is a very transactional business, and Buzz Williams is not that way. Not at all. It’s all about relationships with him, rather than hiring an assistant to recruit a player or NIL contacts. He’s a much deeper person than that,” Layer told me in a quiet corner of the Aggies locker room at Ball Arena, while A&M players munched on chocolate-chip cookies to celebrate advancing to the round of 32 in the NCAA Tournament.

Layer has served as a special assistant and sounding board to Williams for the past five years in College Station.

“Buzz is as good a coach as there is in the country. If I can help somebody who’s in the top five of his profession with ideas that help him stay a step or two ahead,” Layer said, “it makes me feel as if I still might have a little something meaningful to add in this game.”

They’ve been on the same wavelength since 2000, a little over two weeks before Williams got married, Layer took a chance on a young, hyperactive hoops coach from deep in football country to work on his staff at Colorado State.

What strange twist of fate allowed that to happen? This bromance should’ve been doomed from the start, because these guys are as different Butch and Sundance or Deadpool and Wolverine.

Layer “was exhausted when he hired me: I was over the top trying to express how much I wanted to work for him,” Williams recalled. “He hired me 18 days before I married my wife. Sixty days later, his best friend, who was on (the CSU) staff, their daughter was killed when we were on a foreign tour.”

Now we begin to understand this relationship has run on like a river, deeper than basketball, with smiles and secrets they’ve shared and will forever cherish. Or as Williams put it: “There’s a lot of things that have transpired that were never in the print media or on social media.”

They’ve been together so long, from Fort Collins to Milwaukee and Virginia to Texas that it’s hard to say one coach’s name without his closest confidante. They’re Buzz n’ Dale. Dale n’ Buzz. Take your pick.

“I love people that have an edge. I love people that have went about it the wrong way, the hard way and have fought through adversity,” Williams said. “They’re probably not receiving the attention that they’re due … But that unspoken bond of loyalty and love and trust is very difficult for me to articulate.”

Williams, who has won nearly 400 games as a head coach at Marquette, Virginia Tech and Texas A&M, will be the first to tell you he couldn’t have done it without Layer, who has worked for his former assistant at each of those stops across the country.

“There’s never been an ego problem between either of us, regardless of whose title was what,” Williams said.

The unlikely season-ending run to the big dance by the current Colorado State team evoked my memories of 2003, when a Rams squad featuring sophomore center Matt Nelson and senior forward Brian Greene finished sixth in the Mountain West Conference with a 5-9 record but blazed through the conference tourney to earn the right to play mighty Duke in March Madness.

That little miracle was the real beginning of the great big basketball adventure for Dale n’ Buzz.

Now nearly 67 years old, Layer muses: “I wish I had this experience, from what I’ve learned from (Williams), to be a better head coach.”

Like an old married couple, Buzz n’ Dale have been together so long they can finish each other’s sentences.

“No,” Layer insisted, “Buzz is way too smart for me to finish his sentences.”