FIBA had spent the previous summer rearranging its third-tier competition like patio furniture. The 2017-18 season cut the regular season down to 32 teams, eight groups of four, split into two conferences. The top two from each group advanced to a second round of four groups of four. Then the survivors met eight clubs falling out of the Basketball Champions League playoffs in a 16-team knockout round. Three teams qualified as lucky losers from qualifying rounds, drawn by hand into the regular-season pools at the House of Basketball in Mies, Switzerland on 12 October 2017. Mid-season transfers, opt-out clauses and lucky-loser shuffles meant the bracket was, charitably, a moving target. Players had to adjust to new opponents on short notice. Coaches had to scout for games that were not yet scheduled.

Donar Groningen is the kind of club that does not usually trouble continental brackets. Based in the Martiniplaza arena in Groningen, in the cold flat northeast corner of the Netherlands, the team had built itself up patiently through Dutch domestic basketball without ever pretending to be a European power. In 2017-18 it ran further into Europe than ever, all the way through the second round and the round of 16, where it shook off Cluj-Napoca, through the quarter-finals past Mornar Bar, and all the way to the semi-finals before falling to eventual champions Venezia. The big man Evan Bruinsma was named the FIBA Europe Cup's Top Performer of the round twice that season, including back-to-back nods in the second round. The American guard Brandyn Curry collected the same honour after the round of 16 and again, alongside Bruinsma, in Donar's European farewell. For a club used to chasing the Dutch league title each spring, going deep into March in Europe was a glimpse of another world.

The competition that opened with eighty-some clubs and drew on talent from across the continent ended, surprisingly, as a domestic Italian affair. Umana Reyer Venezia, the basketball arm of a Venetian sporting institution, came through the bracket with a roster built around Italian internationals and a few well-chosen Americans. Sidigas Avellino, a club from the wine country east of Naples that had spent decades drifting in and out of the top flight, did the same on the opposite side of the draw. They met over two legs on 25 April and 2 May 2018, with home and away crowds packed into provincial arenas, and Venezia held off Avellino by a single-digit aggregate. It was Venezia's first European title, the kind of trophy a club like this measures in decades.

The Europe Cup may not pay the rent for any of its participants, but it pays in other ways. Clubs like Donar use it to test players against unfamiliar styles, to give a generation of young coaches their first taste of continental travel, and to thicken the resume of homegrown players the league requires every team to roster. FIBA's new eligibility rules forced at least five home-grown players onto every squad of eleven or twelve, a constraint that pushed clubs toward local academies and away from short-term mercenaries. Mid-tier European competitions are where second-tier players become starters, where bench coaches become head coaches, and where small-city fan bases get to chant in Italian and Bulgarian against opponents they will never see again.

Umana Reyer Venezia's 2018 trophy still sits in the club's collection, a modest piece of silverware that nonetheless marked the high point of an era. The competition has carried on through restructurings and rebrandings, and Donar has continued to dip in and out of European basketball without quite matching the 2017-18 run. The match-day reports, the lucky-loser draws, the empty seats in early rounds, the packed arenas in finals: none of it featured on the highlight reels of the bigger European leagues. But this was the season when a Dutch club from Groningen and a Venetian club from a city better known for its canals than its zone defenses both, in their different ways, won.