This was the night when it felt that hope had died, that this crazy dream they all had to bring St. John’s basketball back had been shattered. The Red Storm had just been knocked out of the NIT by Memphis, in Memphis, and into a quiet locker room walked Norm Roberts, who had recruited all of them.
“Coach Roberts walks in, and he has a look on his face that we’ve never seen before,” Justin Burrell recalled. “He comes in the locker room and is talking to us and he tells us, ‘Guys, I don’t think I’ll be here next year.’ And as he says it, he starts to cry. I’m looking around at our coaching staff, and everybody has a sad look on their face. And then he’s telling us, unfortunately he [doesn’t] think he’ll be here next year. And we all bust out crying.
“At that point, I wasn’t sure if he was just speculating or he knew something.”
Roberts knew something. He knew that six years without an invitation to the Big Dance would mean the end for him in Jamaica.
“Then, [we] finally get back to school, we get the news that Coach Roberts was let go and we’re confused, we’re hurt, we’re lost,” Burrell said. “We’re mad at St. John’s for what they did. They couldn’t wait one more year to let him go out with us.
“We feel like we lost our leader. . . . We don’t know if things are gonna be OK. And then when he was finally gone it was just like some of the assistant coaches were around, but he wasn’t around. It was just an awkward feeling.
“[It was] kinda like you didn’t want to speak to them because you felt like they were letting you down,” he added. “It was really morbid around [here]. It was just the worst.”
And then hope walked back through the door with Steve Lavin.
“Coach Lavin is the ultimate people person, so right away he can make you feel better,” Burrell said. “He discussed how his players felt when he left UCLA, and how he was calling them to make sure they were OK. So he understands, and he was also talking about the time that he took over for UCLA, how the players felt when he was coming in. So right away we understood that things were gonna be OK.
“We didn’t understand it, but we knew that it would be OK,” he said. “We didn’t understand how it was gonna be OK, but we knew it would be OK.”
It has been better than OK.
And now St. John’s (20-10) has survived the cheers and tears of Senior Night. They survived to beat South Florida 72-56 at Carnesecca Arena with 20 minutes of hell in the second half. They survived Dwight Hardy (14 points) taking just 11 shots. The Second Season begins: the Big East tournament, where the Red Storm were beaten to a double bye by Syracuse, and the Big Dance, where for the first time in nine years, the Johnnies will be dancing.
March Madness at last, where legends can be made and forever footprints can be left.
Nothing that happened this week — the clunker at Seton Hall, life-and-death for 35 minutes last night against a 9-21 team — has changed Burrell’s mind about the possibilities.
Before last night, Burrell told The Post: “When we come out to play, I feel we can win it all.”
As in national champions.
“I still think so, I still believe that,” Burrell said last night. “We’re a band of brothers, and it’s hard to beat brothers. We’ve been together for so long, played so many games together, it’s really hard to break up this camaraderie we have.”
Up next: the Seton Hall-Rutgers winner Wednesday afternoon at the Garden.
“Of course we would love to get Seton Hall ’cause they beat us,” Burrell said. “But at the end of the day, our road doesn’t end with Seton Hall or Rutgers. We’re gonna keep playing.”
This is an experienced team — 10 seniors — and they are a close-knit team. You saw that when Malik Boothe drew a technical when he noticed South Florida’s Jarris Famous glowering down at a fallen D.J. Kennedy.
“Just coming to the aid of my brother,” Boothe said.
The emotion of Senior Night clearly debilitated the Johnnies in that first half. They lacked focus, intensity, rhythm, smarts.
“The good news is we’re only down two points, and that was as unusual and as odd a 20 minutes of basketball as we’ve played all year,” Lavin told his team.
No more senior moments allowed now.
steve.serby@nypost.com