The setting is 1972 at the Coach's home in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
On the twentieth anniversary of their victory in the Pennsylvania state championship game, four members of the starting lineup of a Catholic high school basketball team have gathered to celebrate. The coach is terminally ill, and this reunion may be their last chance to reminisce with him. However, the fifth member of the starting lineup, Martin (who made the game-winning shot), has refused to attend the reunion; he bears a grudge against the Coach, for reasons that do not become clear until late in the play.
George Sitkowski has become Scranton's mayor, but he has proven inept and unpopular, and he is likely to lose his bid for re-election. The fact that his challenger is Jewish is particularly galling to him.
Phil Romano has become a millionaire in the strip-mining business, using his close ties to Mayor Sitkowski to obtain mining permits. Though Romano helps George financially, he is carrying on an affair with George's wife.
James Daley is a local junior high school principal; his brother Tom is an unsuccessful, embittered, cynical alcoholic and ne'er-do-well writer.
None of the men's lives have turned out as any of them had hoped, and, on some level, all still look to the Coach for guidance. The Coach has always been the embodiment of old-school Catholicism (Senator Joseph McCarthy and Father Charles Coughlin are heroes of his), the one person in their lives who was sure of everything, and his absolute certainty and confidence gave them a sense of security. While the Coach thought he was teaching his players how to be men, it appears that these middle-aged men are still emotional adolescents who need the Coach to tell them how to live their lives. But the Coach's pep talks, which had always inspired them, are beginning to sound hollow. Only now, these many years later, do the men begin to suspect that the Coach was a bigot, a bully, and a bit of a fraud.
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