PROVIDENCE, R.I. — When you come off I-95 at exit 21, the service road sign reads Dave Gavitt Way, which couldn’t be more appropriate.
If ever there was a man dedicated to the service of college basketball, to Northeast basketball, it was Gavitt. The former Providence coach, who died in 2011, gave up a job he loved to save the sport he grew up on.
Conferences were just starting to take shape, sort of like when the Earth was cooling, and Eastern basketball needed a leader. It needed a visionary. It needed Gavitt.
He galvanized and organized, getting Providence, St. John’s, Georgetown and Syracuse in 1979 to invite Boston College, Connecticut, Holy Cross, Rutgers and Seton Hall.
Holy Cross was the only school to decline, a decision that still makes the hardened residents of Worcester, Mass., shiver. Villanova came in the following year, with Pittsburgh signing on in 1982.
Three years later, the Big East was the best basketball league in America. It wasn’t even close.
Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin and Ed Pinckney led Georgetown, St. John’s and Villanova, respectively, to the 1985 Final Four. No other conference has ever sent three teams to a Final Four.
Players from basketball hotbed cities in the Northeast flocked to play the city game at colleges that weren’t selling their souls to football and coliseum-sized stadiums. The Big East was hoops heaven.
The league had entered into what seemed like an arranged marriage, walking down the aisle with an entity known as ESPN. Players from as far away as Los Angeles saw the style of basketball being played, the brilliant coaching, the fervent fans and came east.
If basketball was your love, your passion, there was a legitimate option to the Atlantic Coast Conference, one in which your friends and family could drive to almost every game. Hoops heaven.
But the guardians at the gate forgot the requirements to play in a league with golden baskets and began letting everyone in. Miami, Virginia Tech, Louisville, Notre Dame, come on down.
“What’s happened to the Big East is a travesty, with the understanding that change happens,’’ Providence coach Ed Cooley told The Post. “And it’s unfortunate that the football schools have dominated the landscape and it’s not about the student athlete, it’s, ‘How we can secure finances?’ ’’
The Big East has a second chance, maybe a last chance, and it is a glorious chance.
By the end of the week, the divorce of the Catholic Seven from the rest of the Big East will be complete. The Big East name will remain with the founding schools. The postseason tournament will remain at Madison Square Garden. Programs (Butler, Xavier, St. Louis, Dayton, Creighton) with similar profiles to most of those founding members will join to comprise a new Big East with an old flavor.
The new Big East — with teams playing in basketball hotbeds such as New York, Washington, Newark, Chicago, Milwaukee, Indianapolis and St. Louis — this will be a basketball-centric league.
“We’re going to recruit and say, ‘Don’t worry about being second to anybody,’ ” said Cooley. “You come and you are going to dominate the landscape of college basketball because that’s the only thing we have.
“Our guys are going to come here and be ‘The People.’ People are going to come watch basketball schools, which I’m thrilled about.’’
I was born in East New York, raised in Canarsie and have never forgotten the magnetic magic of bouncing a basketball on the sidewalk and within five minutes there were 20 other kids on the street ready to ball until it was too dark to see the rim.
I was weaned on team basketball, the kind taught by Red Holzman. Pick and rolls, help defense, rebounding — that was the good stuff.
Having “next,” which meant sitting for 20 minutes, your back resting against a chain-link fence, wasn’t fun, but it gave you a chance to study other players, find out which was their strong hand, learn who wouldn’t go to the basket. It was our film room.
The conference landscape might always be dominated by those with big-time football: the Big Ten, the SEC, the Pac-12. But there is a place among the elite for a league that sees the roundball as more beautiful than the pigskin, that sees the brunette standing out in a sea of California blondes.
The new Big East isn’t going to fade into the background. It’s going to thrive.
Because if you’re a basketball player, a coach whose lifeblood was transfused by the game, a fan who loves the electricity generated by thousands of fans crammed into arenas right on top of the court, not a mile high in a luxury box, then this is the league for you. This is basketball.