Nobody will ever be able to take this away from Wake Forest’s men’s basketball program: The Deacons are the first ACC team to head west and sweep Stanford and California.

Wake Forest just had to wait a bit to get to Winston-Salem as a team.

The Deacons’ commercial flight back from California was delayed Sunday. Eight players and four coaches flew back on the private jet of Mit Shah, a Wake Forest board of trustees member and longtime supporter of the program, while the rest of the team waited on the delayed flight.

“Mit Shah, obviously a great friend of the program, a very close friend of mine, sent a private plane,” coach Steve Forbes said Monday on the ACC teleconference. “We got back around 6:30 last night, we went right to the Shah practice facility and did a walk-through for Florida State and watched film.

“The rest of the team, coaches, players, managers got back — I think my son (Christopher, the team’s video coordinator) texted me at 4:50 in the morning.”

Wake Forest is taking Monday off. The NCAA’s rule is that travel days cannot be off days, hence that partial group of Deacons going from the airport to a walk-through; and teams have to take one day off per week.

“It wasn’t ideal for them, but they’re back and it worked out,” Forbes said of the group that got back Monday morning.

The team opted to stay overnight Saturday after beating Cal instead of taking a red-eye flight back.

Along with being the only ACC team to score road wins against of the ACC’s west coast newcomers, the Deacons can join some elite company this weekend. Wake Forest heads to SMU on Saturday after playing host to FSU on Wednesday night.

The only two ACC teams to win in Dallas this season are Duke and Louisville, which won by 27 and 25 at SMU in January, respectively. Wake Forest enters this week with a ½-game lead on the Mustangs for fourth place in the ACC.