It started so innocently, so innocuously: Dwight Hardy in the corner. At the moment, it seemed a mere momentum-buster, nothing more, a 3-pointer that halted a 12-1 Connecticut run, turned a two-point UConn lead into a one-point St. John’s lead just before the half.
What no one could know — not Hardy, not Steve Lavin, not Jim Calhoun, certainly none of the 13,652 at a decidedly pro-Johnnies Garden — was where this was all headed.
Malik Boothe helped craft the story a little more, banking home a Meadowlark Lemon half-court heave at the halftime horn. Calhoun did his part, earning a technical foul as the teams walked off the court, the refs tiring of his ceaseless griping.
These were the next few raindrops in the storm, in a Red Storm, St. John’s embracing its new-age nickname in full, blistering out of halftime, blasting the Huskies, a 12-0 run that became a 22-5 run that became a 40-14 run, a seminal tempest that actually reduced Calhoun to a silent, seated spectator as everyone else at the Garden opted to enjoy the view from their feet, filling the place with a fine old oath:
“WE ARE … ST. JOHN’S!”
“That was a beating,” Calhoun would concede later on. “They completely outplayed us.”
The final was almost anticlimactic — St. John’s 89, Connecticut 72 — except for the weight of what it delivered: For the fourth time in the New Year, the Johnnies dismissed a Top 15 team at the Garden, and for the first time in nine long years — barring something cruelly unforeseen across the next few weeks — St. John’s will find residence on one of the 68 lines when the NCAA tournament is crafted next month.
“This,” Hardy said, “definitely helps our resume.”
Is it too early to look that far ahead? Why should it be? At this point, the Johnnies have proved themselves virtually bulletproof at the Garden, have now clobbered Duke and UConn there, a South Jamaica southpaw taking out Ali and Frazier back to back. Their on-line RPI number was already 22; it doesn’t figure to shrink after this.
“We want them to stay focused on the little things, on every practice, on every game,” said Steve Lavin, the coach who has engineered a complete transformation of a team that looked so disjointed in December, falling to St. Bonaventure and Fordham within five days.
“That said, when they do that, the big picture takes care of itself. And we had as our goal from the start to make the Tournament.”
No, the Johnnies are no fluke, not with the notches on their belt, not with the way they’ve risen the past few weeks. If they can still be puzzlingly inconsistent, still look like a different team on the road, they also have refined themselves into the most dangerous kind of team: relentless on defense, athletic, unselfish, opportunistic on offense.
And they’re also loaded with kids who’ve waited a long time to taste this kind of success. Don’t underestimate that. Many of these players saw the coach who recruited them fired. None of them has ever sniffed the NCAA Tournament before. Every time they pull off one of these surprises against an elite team, it seems a different player assumes the lead role.
Last night it was Hardy who provided the bulk of the fuel, Hardy who outdueled his fellow Bronx native Kemba Walker. Hardy: a kid who endured two years at an Iowa junior-college outpost and was part of Norm Roberts’ final infusion of talent last year, Roberts the one Big East coach who never forgot him during his exile.
Hardy was all but unstoppable, pouring in 33 points, including 20 in the 10-minute spurt bridging the halves that put the game out of reach.
“When I’m in a zone like that,” Hardy said, laughing, “it’s almost like I black out. The basket just gets bigger and bigger.”
Now, so do the Johnnies’ hopes and expectations. It’s been nine years since the Johnnies’ last NCAA game, a 70-60 loss to Wisconsin in Washington, D.C., and so much has happened to the program since then, so much misery, so much darkness.
And now this: this season, this team, this run to the edge of the darkness, too close to the light to stop reaching for it now.