The well-wishers tried to cheer him up, but that wasn’t going to work, wasn’t going to happen, not now, not for a while.
D.J. Kennedy stood with his back against a large photograph of Jay-Z on stage at the Garden, next to pictures of Springsteen and Sinatra, and he stared at his cell phone, and he tried to do the impossible. Tried to make his right knee stop screaming.
“How are you feeling?” asked Scoop Jardine, the Syracuse guard, whose team had just knocked Kennedy’s St. John’s Red Storm out of the Big East Tournament, 79-73.
Kennedy shook his head. Jardine’s face turned solemn.
“Bad?” he asked.
“Pain,” Kennedy said.
So much had gone right for the Johnnies this year, so much chemistry-on-the-run, so much learning-on-the-fly, so much buying into what Steve Lavin and his cast-of-thousands coaching staff have been selling.
Kennedy — one of eight seniors who had to listen to so many people sing hosannas for all the recruiting coups Lavin and his crew had pulled off this fall — easily could have let that message be this: Do what you have to do. Just use your eligibility. Because we need those scholarships.
But Lavin never let them feel that way. He may not have recruited the seniors, but they were his players now.
“He let us know that we were his first team at St. John’s and he’d always remember us anyway, so why not make it especially memorable?” Kennedy had said with a broad smile almost exactly 24 hours earlier, on the other side of the Garden corridor, inside the Knicks’ locker room.
“I know it’s exactly what a lot of us guys who’ve been here a while wanted to hear.”
That had come at the end of a gritty 65-63 win over Rutgers, a game in which every aspect of Kennedy’s considerable versatility was on display. Just in the last few minutes alone Kennedy had nailed a clutch 3, grabbed a huge rebound, made the key defensive stop by plugging the lane and forbidding Rutgers’ Mike Coburn from getting a clean look at a winning shot.
He even ignored an inadvertent buzzer while shooting a free throw, knowing if he missed he’d get a re-do. He didn’t miss.
Lavin has called Kennedy a “stat-sheet filler” all year, the ultimate compliment to the ultimate complementary player: gets points, gets rebounds, draws charges, deals assists, does a little bit of everything.
“Our glue,” Lavin called him Wednesday.
Now, 24 hours later, Lavin’s face drooped when he was asked about his glue. Only six minutes into the game, Kennedy found himself on the floor and in agony. He immediately called for the St. John’s trainer, Ron Linfonte.
His afternoon was done, and his collegiate career, too. Kennedy returned to watch the second half in his white sweat suit, stretching his right leg flat. As the Johnnies and Orange traded haymakers, he was the sobering reminder that St. John’s would lose more than just a basketball game here.
“I know it’s a serious knee injury,” Lavin said, a few hours before learning just how serious: a torn ACL, six to eight months of rehab. And no NCAA Tournament for Kennedy. A gut punch.
Kennedy’s face had already said as much, in the hallway, just outside the cramped room that served as St. John’s’ dressing area yesterday.
Inside, his teammates talked about hoping the best for Kennedy — and for themselves — and spoke bravely about doing whatever they needed to do next week in the NCAA Tournament.
“That’s what D.J. would want,” Justin Brownlee said.
Actually, what he’d really have wanted was for the MRI to reveal something less ominous. And with reason. Syracuse lost Arinze Onuaku late last year, effectively killing its championship aspirations. Georgetown hasn’t been the same since Chris Wright was lost to a hand injury, though the Hoyas believe they’ll have Wright back for the NCAAs.
Jim Boeheim didn’t mince his words.
“You can’t absorb a loss like that,” he said.
The quiet around the Johnnies told you they knew that, too.
Kennedy finally limped away from the Jay-Z picture, walked with Linfonte to the crowded service elevator with Boeheim, with various Syracuse players, with Nick Faldo and his wife.
The Johnnies are bound for brackets, but Kennedy was bound for the Hospital for Special Surgery. Tough trade-off.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com