They’d all been in the building together, Providence players, St. John’s players, all of them hearing the madness bleed through the walls of their dressing rooms, all of them made aware at the exact same instant an unexpected opportunity had just arisen.
Out on the floor at Madison Square Garden, a Seton Hall player named Sterling Gibbs had drilled a buzzer-beating jump shot and the Pirates, from the bottom of the bracket and the brink of spring break, had bought themselves another night at the Big East Tournament, stunning Villanova, 64-63.
In the instant the ball splashed through, the stakes for what was about to come for both the Johnnies and the Friars had taken an abundant jump: the winner would survive a virtual elimination game in the eyes of the NCAA selection committee, and the path to the title game was suddenly a lot more user-friendly.
“We heard it,” Providence forward Kadeem Batts said. “But we knew we had our own work in front of us.”
At least one team realized that.
At St. John’s, they’ve waited three years to play a game with this much meaning attached to it. There have been a lot of starts, a lot of stops, a lot of detours since Gonzaga crushed them in the NCAA Tournament three years ago. There were times you wondered if they would ever win a Big East game. There were moments when they absolutely looked like a Sweet 16 team.
All of that was prelude to this: play 40 good minutes against Providence, grind your way to Friday night, see how all of that shakes out.
And this is what shook out: A complete microcosm of the season.
“We waited too late,” D’Angelo Harrison, the team’s motor and its inspiration, said. “We were just flat.” Talking about the game, when he could have been talking about the season.
Which wasn’t exactly the blueprint any of them had in mind.
“We didn’t help our cause today,” St. John’s coach Steve Lavin said.
Just as the Johnnies had started the season in a fog, they spent the first 34 minutes of this game in a funk. They were 0-5 after five league games; they were trailing 63-46 with 6:10 left in the game. They’d slept through the wake-up call on the first third of their season, then blew off the alarm clock on the first three-quarters of the most critical game of the year.
Inexplicable. And inexcusable. Please, set aside the frantic comeback that followed, the way the Johnnies sliced 16 points off that 17-point lead, which was as much a product of egregious Friars foul shooting as anything else. Don’t get too agitated by a couple of unfriendly whistles late; that’s a loser’s lament.
Focus on this: in a season of such grand — and welcomed — expectation, the Johnnies couldn’t answer the bell. And in a game that could well have delivered them to the brackets, they pulled a similar no-show. It ended 79-74. But it was lost long before. Inexplicable.
And inexcusable.
“It’s in the selection committee’s hands,” Lavin said. “Not a good thing.”
After four years, Lavin has clearly done some good things here. He has brought in terrific, tough players, many of them easy to root for. He ended the NCAA drought in his first year. But if it was unfair to minimize Lavin’s role that year — crediting Norm Roberts’ recruits and Mike Dunlap’s Xs and Os — it would be equally disingenuous to ignore that they should be farther along than this on his watch, and are instead relying on the kindness of committee strangers instead.
That they should have already put together an NCAA-worthy season with this team and these players, expectations Lavin himself courted — properly — and spoke about openly. He is about to be locked up to a sizable extension, and has earned a chance to push this farther.
But the bar is higher now. And Lavin has to be equal to those elevated hopes.
“Look at the stats,” he said. “They’re equal across the board.”
What wasn’t equal? Providence was more prepared. Providence was more poised. Providence seized the game, and then made just enough plays to close it. Do you want to say Ed Cooley schooled Lavin? You can. It doesn’t mean the Johnnies aren’t in capable hands.
It just means those hands need to craft something better. This was a fun season. It was supposed to be more than that.