Orchard Lake — Msgr. Stanley Milewski still laughs about his basketball tryout for the St. Andrew eighth-grade team at the Kronk Gym on Detroit’s west side.

“I couldn’t even bounce the ball,” he recalls. (Uh, Monsignor, the correct terminology is dribble). “They asked me to leave after 10 minutes.”

Such was the inauspicious beginning of the monsignor’s athletic career — but far from the end.

This academic year marks the 70th anniversary of his enrollment in the fall of 1943, at the age of 13, at St. Mary’s Preparatory in Orchard Lake. While he has never worn the red-and-white colors of his alma mater in athletic competition, you’ll find no one more loyal and faithful and enthusiastic — on the edge of fanaticism — in his support of his beloved Eaglets.

His “athletic career” blossomed on the sidelines as scorekeeper, reporter and avid booster, so much so that he is recognized as the Eaglets’ All Time Super Fan.

“I fell in love with being a spectator,” he says.

The prologue for this “love story” begins with his parents purchasing a heavy, used Underwood typewriter for him when he was a youngster. Little Stan lugged the machine along with his belongings to St. Mary’s.

And because he knew how to use it, in his sophomore year, he became the secretary to the athletic director, Fr. Bruno Neumann, typing eligibility lists. That was his introduction to the world of St. Mary’s Prep sports, a passion that is still burning after seven decades.

When St. Mary’s revived football after a 13-year hiatus in the fall of ’44, Stanley Milewski “ran up and down the sidelines, with paper and pencil,” recording statistics.

As a freshman and sophomore at St. Mary’s College Stanley kept the scorebook for a front-row seat to the high school’s basketball team.

His priestly education for the next six years made following the Eaglets a challenge.

At the former St. John’s Theological Seminary in Plymouth, he would be among “a hundred seminarians running after breakfast to read the only one page of Free Press sports that was made available to find out what happened.”

Upon Fr. Milewski’s ordination in 1955, Cardinal Edward Mooney assigned him to St. Frances D’Assisi Parish. He remembers:

“St. Andrew’s (his home parish) was in a state basketball tournament in 1956. I was hearing confessions, but dying to find out how the Flyers were doing. I excused myself on the pretext of having to use the bathroom. I listened to the game on the radio. It went into overtime. The people had to wait longer until I returned.”

He paused. “That still bothers my conscience to this day.”

Then his quest of following the Eaglets took a drastic turn for the better when he was appointed by Cardinal Mooney to the Orchard Lake Schools faculty in January 1957. His responsibilities over the next 43 years included procurator-treasurer, teacher, athletic director and vice rector, climaxed by serving as chancellor of the Orchard Lake Schools from 1977 to 2000.

His unofficial responsibility was picking up the basketball scorebook where he had left off, which he zealously did thru 1982, covering nearly 600 games, reporting scores and game details to area media, and attending an estimated 1,500 games on the busy Eaglets’ sports calendar.

Since 1977, St. Mary’s has won 13 state championships in four sports and been runner-up 13 other times. Athletic director and football and basketball coach, and coach of four of those state titles, George Porritt, says, “You want to win for these kinds of people that Fr. Milewski represents, and encourage your teams to represent St. Mary’s in the best way.”

In 2000, Msgr. Milewski was inducted as a “Catholic League Legend,” only one of nine so recognized in the league’s history, says CHSL director Vic Michaels for “extraordinary service” to the league.

The epilogue for this love story is still being written.