The only existing recording of NBA legend Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game is now in the Library of Congress. And that piece of basketball history might have been lost if not for a UMass student hundreds of miles away.

Jim Trelease says it was a confluence of circumstances that made the recording of Chamberlain’s record-setting game on March 2nd, 1962, possible.

The then-Philadelphia Warriors were playing the New York Knicks, his favorite team, in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Trelease managed to hook up a five story high antenna to steam pipes in his Amherst dorm room to catch the signal from the local Philadelphia radio station carrying the game. And he says the reception on his transistor radio was enhanced by the fact that fewer florescent lights were on in the bathrooms, because many residents were out of the dorms for Friday night.

Trelease says he fell asleep during the game but awoke to hear the station would rebroadcast the game’s fourth quarter station about 3:30 that morning.

“I had my girlfriend’s — who’s now my wife — I had my girlfriend’s tape recorder in the closet,” he said. “So I got that out, put it up against the radio alongside of the pipes, kept myself awake until 3:30, went around the dormitory turned off all the fluorescent lights, prayed that no one would need to use the facilities and taped the game.”

Trelease calls the recording’s selection by the Library of Congress, “icing on the cake,” as it coincided with his 75 birthday.

Trelease, who became an award winning artist, journalist and author of read aloud books, joins another UMass classmate, folk singer Buffy Saint-Marie, among this year’s 25 selectees to the Library of Congress.