Mo made it.

At long last, after legal wranglings, letter-writing campaigns and fund-raisers that continue for financially troubled ex-pros, after Jack Twyman's single-handed persistence, the late Maurice Stokes of Westinghouse High School and St. Francis College was announced Monday as a 2004 inductee into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

The next day was the anniversary of his death.

Good Friday was the anniversary of the day he was buried, the first layperson interred at the Franciscans' campus cemetery.

Mo always had an interesting sense of timing.

"I told the people in St. Francis, Maurice is looking down on us," Twyman said by telephone from his Cincinnati home. "And he's got a grin from ear to ear."

This is a tale of black and white, of tragedy and triumph, of Mo Stokes and Jack Twyman. It's a distinctly Pittsburgh tale, too. It's a shame Hollywood's one made-for-TV try, "Maurie" in 1973, failed to do it justice.

Twyman was a Central Catholic High School kid, three times cut from the basketball team, who first met Stokes on the exacting Mellon Park playgrounds. Together with Stokes' Westinghouse teammate Ed Fleming and Dick Ricketts, they scrimmaged -- and often beat -- Dudey Moore's decorated Duquesne University fellas. These kids went their separate ways in college, Twyman to the University of Cincinnati and Stokes to St. Francis, but the basketball gods kept bringing them together.

First, they were reunited in the 1955 National Invitation Tournament, back when it meant more than the NCAA tournament. Stokes scored 43 of the Frankies' 73 points in a semifinal loss to Dayton -- remember, this was years before the 3-point line -- and appropriately finished his college career on the same floor as Twyman in a consolation defeat, then becoming the only player from a fourth-place finisher to win tournament MVP. "During the 12 years he was sick, I never let him forget that we beat them," Twyman said, kidding. "And I outscored him, 28 to 27."

That summer of 1955, the Rochester Royals drafted Stokes second overall, Twyman ninth and Fleming a round later. The Pittsburgh guys all met at Twyman's house and drove north for training camp. By the time the team moved to Cincinnati two seasons later, Stokes was growing into a three-time All-Star and an NBA beacon. He set the league record for rebounds in a game. He amazingly finished second in rebounds, third in assists and averaged double-doubles in a career long before Magic Johnson was born.

Then, on March 12, 1958, he got entangled with a Minneapolis Lakers rebounder and fell to the floor with a thud, landing on his head. Three days later, on the plane home from a Detroit playoff game in which he had 12 points and 15 rebounds, he collapsed into Twyman's arms. It was diagnosed as post-traumatic encephalopathy. He was unconscious for months and paralyzed the rest of his life.

In those heated days of segregation, the white Twyman became benefactor and brother to the black Stokes. He became legal guardian and guardian angel. Merciful and militant.

When the Royals' new owners balked and Mo's parents couldn't afford medical costs, Twyman sued for workman's compensation and adopted his 24-year-old, wheelchair-bound friend. When even his money started to dwindle, he launched the Catskills charity basketball game that initially raised $300,000 for Mo and attracted NBA stars over the next 40 years, giving way to a golf event today. When Stokes awoke in a Cincinnati hospital, he was greeted at least every other day by Twyman or his wife, Carole, or driven to their home for Sunday dinner with their four children.

It was the Twymans who helped him relearn to speak. It was Twyman who opened his home to the former St. Francis president, the Rev. Vincent Negherbon, and television cameras in a scene replayed at 9 p.m. today in a wonderful Fox Sports Net feature produced locally by Nikki Gasti and narrated by Pat Parris. When Negherbon asked, "Would you be willing to have our new field house named after you?" they had to wipe away the tears from underneath Stokes' glasses. And it was Twyman -- at the behest of St. Francis folks -- who nominated Stokes until finally being successful this year, a generation after his own hall of fame induction.

"Oh, yeah, there was a lot of pressure from Jack," Negherbon said.

"I'm sure that he didn't allow the veterans committee to forget about Maurice," added Bob Crusciel, St. Francis' alumni relations director.

Two days after Monday's announcement, he heard Twyman break up over the telephone while talking about it. Twyman wasn't alone. Crusciel called former teammates to tell them the grand news, "and I can't tell you how many of those men, in their 70s or on the verge were in tears."

On April 6, 1970, Mo Stokes died of a heart attack, prompting St. Francis to remember him with a simple cemetery headstone, a Maurice Stokes Athletic Center from where his No. 26 hangs and a Stokes Booster Club.

On April 5, 2004 -- "that [date] wasn't lost on people here," Crusciel added -- his moment for perpetuity around basketball America arrived.

"It's just wonderful," Twyman said. "I'm happy for Maurice. I'm happy for St. Francis. I'm happy for anybody that ever came in contact with him."

So is Twyman. On Sept. 10, at induction ceremonies in Springfield, Mass., he will accept on Mo's behalf. Carole and their children will assemble there along with much of the St. Francis family.

"We're going up," Twyman said, "to honor Maurice."

No, he has been doing that for a half-century already.