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Wherever Morgan State’s basketball team goes this season, the Bears take Anthony Anderson with them. He was in Winston-Salem, N.C., last week – in spirit, at least – when they won the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference tournament championship. And he’ll be in Buffalo’s HSBC Arena on Friday – emotionally – when they play West Virginia in an opening-round game in the NCAA East Regional. Physically, the 19-year-old from St. Charles remains at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He has been waging a fight against acute myeloid leukemia since October.

If things had gone better, Anderson would have joined his teammates in Buffalo, a reward for four rounds of chemotherapy. He asked his teammates a week ago to win the MEAC so he could go to an NCAA tournament. But his blood cell count was too low, and Anderson’s dream trip was denied. He had his hopes up, I had my hopes up,” his mother, TaWanna Williams, said on Wednesday. “I talked to him this morning, and he said, ‘Mom, it’s OK, I’m not going to let it get me down any worse than what this has gotten me.’ He’s had his moments. His back pain was so bad this morning, he was crying.”

Before taking the first question, Bozeman gave a compelling overview of what his 27-9 team had overcome this season on the way to winning a second straight Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference championship and making a second straight N.C.A.A. appearance.

¶The father of the sophomore guard Ameer Ali committed suicide.

¶The senior guard Troy Smith’s daughter, who was born blind, had to have a tumor removed.

¶The popular freshman forward Anthony Anderson, who redshirted last season, was told he had leukemia after the first day of practice.

Bozeman used the numbing events to underscore his favorite message: the power of overcoming obstacles. “Everybody is going to have adversity,” he said. “It just depends on how you deal with it.”

Bozeman did not point out another grueling journey: his own.

His presence at Morgan reflects a determined rebound from a steep fall from grace. In an industry in which every coach is looking for the next great job, Bozeman’s journey also raises questions about balancing loyalty with ambition.

This time 17 years ago — March 20, 1993 — Bozeman was the uncrowned prince of Division I men’s basketball. At age 29 he had become the coach at California a month after players threatened a rebellion against Lou Campanelli. With Jason Kidd at point guard, Cal enjoyed an amazing run through the tournament, peaking with an upset of Duke, the two-time defending national champion. Bozeman became the youngest coach to reach the Round of 16.

Three seasons later, however, Bozeman admitted paying $30,000 to the parents of point guard Jelani Gardner, and in August 1996 he resigned.

On Thursday Bozeman described going through an unimaginable wilderness. Friends would not take his calls. In need of employment, he worked in pharmaceuticals and coached Amateur Athletic Union ball. “I went from coaching a Pac-10 team to coaching a 9-and-under team to having a parent tell me how to coach the team,” he said.

He would not get another college head coaching job until 2006, when Floyd Kerr, the Morgan State athletic director, hired Bozeman.

Bozeman vowed to transform the program’s culture of losing to one of great expectations.

Last season Bozeman, now 46, led Morgan to its first N.C.A.A. tournament bid. This season he invoked President Obama’s journey to the White House as a metaphor for even greater accomplishments in the tournament.

Bozeman’s next great challenge will have nothing to do with strategy but with loyalty. He is certain to attract attention from a midmajor program eager to rebuild, make the tournament and take on the nation’s Goliaths. The budget no doubt will be heftier, the facilities more modern, the compensation richer than at Morgan.

In an ideal world — and this is certainly the romantic in my soul — Bozeman would stay put. He would remember who answered his call when no one else would. Bozeman can write his own ending.

He can leave for greener pastures or he can stay put and become a folk hero for the historically black colleges and universities — a latter-day Big House Gaines, the coach at Winston-Salem State for 47 years, or John McLendon, the longtime college and professional coach.

Bozeman could turn a small program into an attractive niche as Mark Few has done at Gonzaga or Eddie Robinson did at Grambling in football. That niche is taking diamonds in the rough, players with intangibles, who relish fighting through life’s picks and screens.

At an idealistic level, Bozeman said, he would love to stay. At a university politics level, he said, the going has not been as smooth as outsiders might imagine.

“The tough part is the battles you fight that are within that people are not aware that you’re fighting,” he said. “I always believed an H.B.C.U. could become a national power, but you fight the backbiting, the people who take advantage of their authority, the people who abuse their authority, the people who don’t like to see you successful.”

Asked specifically about other opportunities, Bozeman said: “I don’t know when that time will be, but I’m preparing to continue to be here. If that happens, that happens. This time has been special for me, but it’s also given me a chance to see that other side, to see why they have not been able to knock through and have that success.”

Whether he stays for 10 seasons or leaves after four, Bozeman has won a significant battle to reclaim his good name. His slate is clean.

“At the end of the day, when he’s a success, we’re a success as a department, we achieved our goals and objectives,” Kerr, the athletic director, said. “We’ve represented the university well and run a clean program. At the end of the day I think everybody will cheer everybody on and have what we call D.W.D. — departure with dignity.”

In 1996 Bozeman resigned in shame. Fourteen years later, older and wiser, he has built a program virtually from scratch. In the process he has taught young players a valuable lesson in survival. Adversity is a fact of life; how you overcome it will determine the quality of that life.