On Tuesday morning, Amy Mulligan was sitting in her Sports and Society class and all was still well in both. She heard passing students discuss a plane hitting the World Trade Center, but figured they must have been rehashing some cut-rate action flick.

Twenty minutes later, she heard that the building was rubble. And Mulligan, a Queens native and junior forward on the University of Vermont basketball team, was racing outside, punching numbers on her cell phone. Her godfather worked around the corner from the crumbling buildings and her brother Greg was only half a mile away -- at least she thought. "I wasn't sure how close my brother worked to the towers," Mulligan says. "It was a terrible feeling."

After 20 frantic minutes, a call to the family home revealed that both had checked in, safe. But it would be 12 agonizing hours before Mulligan learned that everyone else in the New York area -- family friends working downtown, pals and coaches from Christ The King High School -- were alive.

Helplessly sequestered on the idyllic campus while tragedy ravaged her hometown, the lifelong New Yorker had to do something. "This wasn't just some place on the news," she says. "It was my home."

So she went to a familiar haunt, Patrick Gymnasium, to help with a Red Cross blood drive. With the wait already four hours to donate, Mulligan instead aided by making sure everyone had food and water. She continued to work there, eventually giving blood also, until the center had gotten enough donations to close at the end of the week.

Satisfied that she helped the people back home, Mulligan is now planning to go back herself as soon as possible. No doubt that will be sobering jaunt.

"I always turned onto the Whitestone Bridge, saw the New York skyline and felt like I was home," says Mulligan, who had a stunning view of the World Trade towers from a hill near her house. "I can't even picture the city without those buildings."