Stephen F. Austin hero Nathan Bain’s gofundme page surpasses $125,000

Call it a Thanksgiving miracle.

Donations continued to roll in on Nathan Bain’s gofundme page on Thursday, bringing the total to over $125,000.

Bain is the Stephen F. Austin player who made the game-winning layup to upset No. 1 Duke in overtime Tuesday, 85-83, at Cameron Indoor Stadium. He is from the Bahamas and his home was all but destroyed by Hurricane Dorian.

Before the Lumberjacks-Blue Devils game tipped off at 9 p.m. Tuesday, the gofundme page, set up by SFA compliance, showed a little more than $2,000 raised toward a $25,000 goal. But Bain’s shot -- which ended Duke’s 150-game home win streak against nonconference foes -- and his touching postgame interview raised awareness for the cause.

By mid-morning Wednesday the $25,000 goal had been met. At 4 p.m. Thursday, the page showed donations totaling more than five times that original goal, with money still coming in. At that time, more than 3,400 donations had been made.

“I was just in disbelief at what basketball had done for my family,” Bain told the Associated Press on Wednesday. “It was truly a blessing.”

Bain said his family “lost everything inside” its single-story home in Freeport, Grand Bahama. His father Norris, a minister, runs the Tabernacle Baptist Church, which Nathan said has “a couple hundred” congregants and an affiliated K-12 school with an enrollment of about 800. Both suffered severe damage from the Category 5 storm that hit the islands, with their home and the church “gutted.”

Dorian hammered the northern Abaco and Grand Bahama islands before giving a glancing blow to the southeastern United States. There were 67 confirmed deaths and 282 people were still missing as of late October along with $3.4 billion in losses for the Bahamas, according to a recent report.

“We just want to make sure we get the people around us taken care of at the church, at the school,” Nathan Bain said. “That’s really our main focus, to make sure everyone has a place to worship and to make sure the school is taken care of so these kids can get a proper education.”

-- The Associated Press contributed to this story

This story was originally published November 27, 2019 at 2:23 AM with the headline "Stephen F. Austin hero Nathan Bain’s gofundme page surpasses $125,000."