The suspense of a playoff game not won until the final buzzer Saturday didn’t kill Princeton. So the Tigers would have sat patiently at the Frist Student Center on their campus yesterday until the final chicken wing was gone or their first-round matchup was announced.
But bang, Princeton’s first-round NCAA tournament East Region match against fourth-seeded Kentucky on Thursday in Tampa, Fla., was the fourth one announced on the selection show.
So the cheer was a little startled actually, before Kareem Maddox, the first-team all-league center, quickly summoned his Ivy League wit to tell the crowd he expects his Tigers to be the “wildest cats in Tampa” on Thursday.
Then, the party pretty much broke up without anyone seemingly interested in hanging around to learn that Ivy co-champion Harvard, with an RPI worthy of consideration, did not get an at-large berth.
“Honestly, I don’t want them in, they’re a rival,” said sophomore forward Ian Hummer. “But I guess it would be good for the league.”
What Cornell did last year — beat Temple and Wisconsin before losing to Kentucky — was very good for a league that hadn’t had a team win an NCAA tournament game since the 1998 Tigers — a top 10 club with a five-seed — beat UNLV.
“We have to make our own history,” said coach Sydney Johnson, the captain of the Princeton team that upset UCLA in 1996. But he did appreciate the tradition represented by Princeton vs. Kentucky.
“The tournament folks kind of have a feel for history,” said Johnson. “It was Cornell-Kentucky last year, so I’m not really surprised by this.”
Nor was he by Princeton’s 13th seed.
“I’m glad we didn’t drop to 14 or 15,” he said. “I thought we were better than that, but 12 would have been generous.”
And the smiles in Princeton since Doug Davis’ last-second shot dropped in Saturday have been generous, too.
“Every time I see [senior guard] Dan Mavraides I feel like giving him a hug,” said Johnson. “You just keep smiling and keep hugging, but now just one or two more hugs and we go to work.”
He has caught Kentucky on television.
“Off the top of my head, Brandon Knight is fantastic,” said Johnson. “He controls the game, and Terrence Jones is an obvious NBA-caliber talent [who] looks like a man out there among boys.
“Then, you see the passion of coach [John] Calipari, it’s pretty impressive.”
But so is this 24th Princeton NCAA bid, all since 1952, most of any team in the Ivy League, one more than Penn.
“But this is the first time for these guys to the tournament so this is very, very special for us,” Johnson said.
jay.greenberg@nypost.com