Kansas guard Tyshawn Taylor talks with media members about his thoughts on defending the Illinois guards on Saturday, March 19, 2011 at the BOK Center in Tulsa.

A somber Tyshawn Taylor plans to take time today to reflect on the 10-year anniversary of the worst day of his life — one of the worst days in U.S. history — Sept. 11, 2001.

“That was a long time ago. It seems like it was just yesterday,” said Taylor, Kansas University’s senior basketball point guard from Hoboken, N.J. His hometown is located just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, N.Y., site of the infamous al-Qaeda-led attack on the United States.

Taylor, who was an 11-year-old sixth-grader, remembers “a lot of madness going on” at his elementary school after a pair of planes plunged into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The towers crumbled at 9:59 a.m. and 10:28 a.m.

“I really didn’t know what to think. I didn’t understand it too much, but once I got to understand it, I was like, ‘Dang, I can’t believe this scene that’s happening,”’ Taylor said Thursday.

“It was nerve-wracking to me because when you are young like that and see adults panicking, as a kid you are naturally just like, ‘Uh oh, now it’s time for us to panic,'” added Taylor. He and other students watched teachers break down and cry as they viewed 9-11 footage on TV while waiting patiently for relatives to come retrieve the students in the early-afternoon hours.

Taylor’s aunt drove Tyshawn and four of his cousins to her home in Hoboken, where the youths were told exactly what was happening.

“Hoboken … the only thing that separates us from that part of the city, New York City, is the Hudson River. From my aunt’s house, you could look out the window and see mass smoke — clouds and clouds of smoke,” Taylor said. “We saw so much … all these boats coming from New York on the river to New Jersey. They replayed it over and over on TV. It was really bad.”

Taylor has cell-phoned various relatives in days leading up to 9-11-2011.

“I was talking to my aunt who actually had a friend on one of the planes that was hijacked,” Taylor said. “Later, there was a movie made about 9/11 that had her friend’s plane on it. I watched that movie with her one day, and she broke down. None of my family members were injured or anything, but some of my family members had friends that worked there (Ground Zero). My aunt still works for the transit. My grandmother works for New Jersey transit. Those are some of the things that were definitely affected in the area big-time.”

Taylor has visited Ground Zero a few times since the attacks and is pleased to hear the site is being rebuilt with several skyscrapers and a memorial that has been finished and will be revealed today.

“I think in New York it kind of brought people together. I think it did that for the whole United States,” Taylor said. “Everybody felt like they had to be more family than anything. Even people you didn’t know … you wanted to help out. I really didn’t understand it at that time. It wasn’t really me taking action, but my family did a lot. I talked to my mom about it the other day. She was telling me how basically people were, ‘You’ve got to help each other. Everybody has to do something.’ That’s what it was.

“I think it opened up people’s eyes for a lot of things that were happening already that people didn’t really pay attention to. Things have changed a lot since then, but people are still together.”