PATRICK CHAMBERS had a second interview scheduled in a few days. He was going to talk with the people at Archbishop Carroll High about their head-coaching job. After a night out with some friends, he wanted to get back at a reasonable hour.

"He says to those guys, 'I can't stay out, I got an interview, I'm heading back to the hotel,' " Patrick's brother, Tim, said as he was telling the story Monday afternoon.

It was in the fall of 2002. Chambers, then an assistant coach to Dan Dougherty at Episcopal Academy, was staying at a Center City hotel. He was in the lobby, talking to a woman who, according to Tim Chambers, was a "friend of a friend."

"I walked into the hotel, saw an old friend, said hello to her," Patrick Chambers said. "She introduced me to a friend of hers. The next thing you know, that's when I got attacked."

The woman's husband apparently thought she was flirting with Chambers. He jumped over a railing, cracked his cocktail glass on the brass bar.

"And sliced him from his ear down to his Adam's apple," Tim said.

The scar on Patrick's neck is the evidence of what happened that night, the same night, according to Tim, they gave his brother "last rites."

"Wrong time, wrong place, wrong situation," Patrick Chambers said.

Chambers lost a lot of blood. He was in the hospital for a few days. He remembers hearing in the ambulance that they "weren't sure if this guy's going to make it."

Chambers did not make the Carroll interview. Paul Romanczuk got that job and might have gotten it under any circumstance.

Chambers recovered. Went to court several times to testify. Went back to Episcopal where he helped coach Wayne Ellington and Gerald Henderson.

After the 2003-04 season, Billy Lange left Jay Wright's staff to take the Navy job. Wright hired Chambers to take his place. It was no great secret that Wright wanted Henderson and/or Ellington.

"We're a very close family," Tim Chambers said. "He confides in us that I'm hoping that I can get one of the two to Villanova and knows that Jay hired him thinking that. That's just the way the business is."

Henderson went to Duke, Ellington to North Carolina.

"I know he was hurt in losing both of those players," Tim Chambers said.

Five years later, Patrick Chambers is the Villanova associate head coach. In his five seasons, the Wildcats are 126-44 with five NCAA appearances, two Sweet 16 appearances, an Elite Eight and, on Saturday, the Final Four at Ford Field in Detroit.

"Sometimes, fate has a funny way of playing things out," Chambers said.

Tim Chambers was watching on television when Carroll and Romanczuk won the PIAA Class AAA state title.

"I'm thinking just how interesting the storylines are of these two people," he said.

Patrick Chambers did not get the Carroll job. He did not get either of the players from Episcopal. Instead, he got everything else.

Chambers is now very much in play for a head college job, following in the footsteps of other Wright Villanova assistants - Lange, Joe Jones (Columbia) and Fred Hill (Rutgers).

"What Jay has taught me, I would like to try to do at another university," Chambers said. "Affect kids' lives, to be a leader of a program. There comes a time. It might not be this year. It might be next year that you want to take on that challenge.

"I think it's about challenges. I think it's about what your goals are. Hopefully, in the near future, that opportunity will come. You just want to take everything that you learned from a guy like Jay and put it into use because I think he's one of the best coaches in the country, if not the best."

Chambers was very instrumental in the great recruiting class Villanova has coming in for next season. People just like him.

"We think he's a great coach," his brother said. "You talk to people in the business and whatever that 'it' is, he has it."

The Chambers clan grew up in Newtown Square - nine boys, three girls. Patrick, 38, is the youngest. They are all extremely close.

"It was the greatest growing up," Patrick Chambers said. "I didn't know any other way . . . We're such a tight family. We love being around each other, we love pushing each other, we love needling each other. We love enjoying each other's success and we're there for each other in our failures. Every step of the way, my family's been with me. Hopefully, I've been there for them as well."

Paul Chambers was a really good point guard at Penn as Patrick enrolled at Drexel. He was promptly cut from the basketball team. Given Paul's success, getting cut, according to Tim, was difficult for Patrick.

"A couple of the brothers and the father take me to play golf and try to convince me to give him a scholarship," Philadelphia University coach Herb Magee said. "The more holes I won and, afterward the couple of beers that I had, they're, 'Come on, Herb, have another beer.' I'm like, 'If the kid can play, we'll help him. If he can't play, we're not going to help him. You can buy as many beers as you want and play as many rounds of golf as you want.' "

The kid could play.

"When he got there, it was obvious he could play, that he had what we didn't have at the time, the toughness, leadership quality," Magee said.

Like Paul, Patrick Chambers was a point guard. He played with some of the best players and on some of the best teams in Philly U. history. His 709 assists are a school record.

"I think he had like a 7-to-1 assist-turnover ratio," Magee said. "And he would guard the other team's best player. Senior year, he averaged about three points a game and he was on the league all-star team."

Magee is very proud of his former players and assistants who have become coaches. He is thrilled about that former player he learned about that day at the golf course.

"Jay took a major risk on a high school guy," Patrick Chambers said. "For that, I'll never forget him. I'll be indebted to him forever. To be where I am right now is a dream come true. It's incredible. I would never have thought I'd be going to the Final Four."

The Chambers family has certainly had its share of success. Tim expects "Our Lady of Victory," the movie about Immaculata basketball, to be released this fall when they "work out a deal with two Hollywood distributors." He is the movie's producer, director and writer.

One of the clan, however, has never sat on the sideline at the Final Four. That changes Saturday night when Patrick takes his spot next to Wright on the Villanova bench at Ford Field when the Wildcats play North Carolina in the second game of the national semifinals.

"I'm still in shock," Chambers said. "Jay actually said the other night, 'I think I'm still numb that we're still playing.'

"I usually go out to the Final Four on Thursday and hang out with [Penn assistant] John Gallagher and all the Philly guys."

Each year on the Friday of Final Four weekend, Wright hosts a "Villanova party" where much of Philadelphia basketball gathers.

"There's no Villanova party this year," Chambers said.

Actually, it has just changed venues and nights. This year, it will be under the roof of a large dome with 70,000 guests, several thousand of them from Philadelphia. *