The sounds were winding down and the people inside Madison Square Garden were revving up, lifting their voices and bursting their vocal chords.
There were 10,340 of them, most of them in red, most of them screaming themselves hoarse, most of them giddy at the scoreboard above — which read St. John’s 82, Georgetown 60 — and at the players below, waving their arms and shaking their fists and listening for the final horn to hum.
All of them still capable of having their weeks made by the sight of the dreaded Hoyas walking into the Garden and having their heads handed to them by the Johnnies. Doesn’t matter if it’s 1984 or 2004 or 2014. That feels good.
“This,” D’Angelo Harrison said, “feels good.”
This is what Steve Lavin saw before anyone else did, back in December, which means it was back before the winning streak and back before the losing streak that preceded it, before St. John’s had played one second of conference play, when his team finished off an indifferent win against Columbia to finish off a mostly indifferent non-conference schedule.
This is what he said that night, three days after Christmas: “I think by mid-February, this could be a dangerous team.”
Well, it is mid-February and the Johnnies are not only a dangerous team but an explosive one, riding an epic run from the bottom of the Big East to just beneath the upper echelon, with plenty of season left to keep riding the elevator north. What Lavin saw in theory on the eve of the New Year we can all see in practice by Presidents Day.
“This,” he said Sunday, “was a team I thought could take flight.”
It is flying. And right on Lavin’s schedule, too.
The Johnnies have a point guard in Rysheed Jordan who improves not by the game but by the half, who is playing like a first-semester junior and not a second-semester freshman, who had 24 points in 35 brilliant minutes, three days after making the breathtaking pass that won a had-to-have-it game at Seton Hall.
They have a veteran leader in Harrison, who a week ago refused to allow them to lose to Creighton and Sunday was superb playing a Georgetown team against whom he’d lost five times in his career by an average of 15 points a pop. They have a resilient strain in their team DNA that allowed them to make a 44-point turnaround from first half to first half of their games against the Hoyas this year, from 26 down to 18 up.
And when the Hoyas chiseled the lead from 20 to seven with plenty of time to go, the Johnnies bared their teeth, converting on six of the next seven possessions, a series of haymakers that stole Georgetown’s will and chased the visitors to the bus, and by the end it was enough to make the Garden sound the way it’s supposed to sound, supporting a team worthy of that loud devotion.
“We were hungry for this win,” said Harrison, who finished with 24 points and solidified his place at the front of the list for the Haggerty Trophy. “We came out with a lot of energy and sustained it for 40 minutes.”
They have actually sustained this level for a month, since eking out the first of two one-point wins over Seton Hall and establishing an early mind-set of survive-and-advance that has grown slowly and steadily and fortified them through eight wins in nine games. The NCAA was fool’s gold at the start of this run; now, there isn’t an elite team that would want any part of seeing the Johnnies in its bracket …
If they make the bracket. There is still work ahead, still games to be won, still a résumé to build. At this pace, playing this well, they should squeeze in. They are certainly playing like an NCAA Tournament team now, which is different than actually being one. That’s for the next four weeks to decide.
“I think our best basketball is ahead of us,” Lavin said.
If he’s right, if he is as prescient and as prophetic as he was in late December, then March could be every bit as interesting as February has been, and maybe more. Maybe much more.