Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

Sports

It all went right for St. John’s

To this point it had been a splendid New York basketball afternoon, and there were 10,803 people inside Madison Square Garden who were settled in for all that can mean.

St. John’s led Fordham 13-11, an evenly-matched, steadily-paced game, and if it seemed odd for many of the old-timers that they should be playing the Holiday Festival this early in the holiday season … well, that was another debate for another day.

JaKarr Sampson made a shot for St. John’s, a layup, the Johnnies exploiting an extraordinary height advantage over the Rams. The St. John’s segment stirred a little. Sir’Dominic Pointer dunked. Then he laid one in. Then Orlando Sanchez made a layup, and his free throw completed a three-point play.

And Sampson made another layup.

And then another.

On the Fordham sideline, coach Tom Pecora said to himself: “Well, they can’t keep shooting like that.’’

He was right. The Red Storm would get even hotter. A dunk by Sanchez. A jumper by Sampson. A dunk by Pointer, and a 3 by Phil Greene, and …

“We took turns dominating the game,” Sampson would say later.

It was extraordinary. It was surreal. It was a stretch of 12 minutes and 37 seconds that was as close to perfect as the sport allows. Seventeen shots St. John’s attempted. Seventeen times the ball splashed clean. By the time D’Angelo Harrison missed a jumper with 51 seconds left in the half a two-point lead had ballooned to 18 and the Johnnies were shooting 88 percent from the field.

Eighty-eight percent.

Five guys shooting alone and unguarded in an empty gym would have a hard time shooting 88 percent.

“We shared the sugar,” is the way St. John’s coach Steve Lavin would describe it later on, when this 104-58 St. John’s victory was complete. “Some things came together that we’ve been working on. I like the pieces. I like where we can be in February and March.”

Where they were on Pearl Harbor Day wasn’t so terrible, either. Fordham is a nice club, was 4-2 coming in, had beaten Manhattan, but there was a reason the Rams were 12-point underdogs. St. John’s was supposed to win this game, and win it comfortably.

But not this comfortably.

Not chaise-lounge-and-a-frozen-drink comfortably.

“It’s tough to guard all of us at the same time,” Harrison said, and if this is the way the Johnnies are going to share the ball and shoot the ball and defend, then we may well be at the start of what could be fun, fun trip from here to the Big East Tournament.

“If they shoot the ball like this,” Pecora said, “I can see great things for them.”

Now, this is the same team that was life-and-death with Bucknell, which played sluggishly against Monmouth and Longwood. But even after this beat-down of their outer-boroughs rival, they showed a refreshing candor and a more refreshing humility, indicative of a team that fully understands the game isn’t always going to be thiseasy.

“Everyone had their game going today,” Harrison said.

“Everyone was clicking,” Sampson said. “It’s fun to see all your teammates out there doing well.”

It’s fun to shoot 66 percent for the game, to have 29 assists against nine turnovers, to hold Fordham’s splendid freshman, Jon Severe, to 1-for-21 shooting from the floor, to emerge from this intramural city squabble with a surge of momentum.

“It’s hard to imagine being able to play better than that,” Sampson said, and as Fordham returned to Rose Hill — ZIP code 10458 — maybe they took that as a consolation prize: St. John’s saved their best for them. Though probably not.