Bologna –
With the Segafredo jersey he has done more than anyone else: one scudetto, three supercups, two European cups, as well as the rebirth from A2, and he will touch 400 official appearances in the Virtus jersey right in the presence of the most important sports club in the world, Real Madrid.
You couldn’t ask for anything better than Alessandro Pajola, an Ancona native born in 1999, today’s standard bearer on whom glorious HCL memories can already be unrolled from the album of memories. Right from those under-15 national finals with Stamura Ancona in which he made his debut against the Vu Nere. It was the first approach to a world that in 2015 would welcome him with open arms, making him debut, as soon as he arrived, on the first day of the championship precisely in the Italian derby against Olimpia. He always happened to be in good company, of course, but they would not have kept him so long if he had bluffed, if while still 16 years old he had not immediately shown the right face to enter the fray. Useful more than star, solid more than social, Pajola has always delivered to Virtus commitment, sweat, defense, selflessness but also important goals. Without anxieties even when Teodosic and Markovic were taken in his role, cumbersome figures who would have nullified many personalities, especially of a young man. But not his own.
Without ever thinking that he had conquered Samarkand, Pajo came out of that experience with something in his pocket worth more than numbers, hoisting himself, if anything, on some new certainty: the sense of feeling part of the system, within a style that has always put concreteness before the knockout blow.
In the meantime, he has become the club’s fourth all-time assistman in Serie A, and has also earned some personal medals: best under-22 and best defender in the league, and MVP in the Supercup. Basketball is a beautiful game because it is logical, but it becomes stupendous when it unveils illogical arcana, which the “cinno” from Ancona, in the meantime become a man, has been carrying on for 9 years in the Virtus world.
