For a good portion of Saturday afternoon, I didn’t even have to watch a basketball game on the floor of Madison Square Garden.
For the first 28 minutes or so, when St. John’s was desperately trying to look into the eyes of the Connecticut Huskies, you could close your eyes for long stretches and just listen to the great symphony of old-fashioned Big East ball. It might have been. Let me take you there.
“I got goosebumps during the national anthem,” UW coach Dan Hurley said.
St. John’s University coach Rick Pitino agreed: “It’s a great atmosphere for a college basketball game.”
Of course, when you open your eyes again, what you see shouldn’t surprise you. The Huskies are currently the No. 1 ranked team in the sport, and that’s great. They are also one of the few teams expected to play the final weekend of the season in Phoenix in April. That’s better.
“They’re better than us,” Pitino said with a shrug. That four-word summary tells much of the story of this 77-64 victory for UW, which now stands at 20-2. Alex Karavan’s.
They may have shared the 212 area code and zip code 10001 for two hours and three minutes, but the Huskies and Johnny live on far different premises within the college basketball grid.
Connecticut has already climbed the highest peak, and now all it has to do is protect what it has and what it has gained five times in the last 25 years.
St. John’s is still a staging area at the foot of that mountain. It’s clear this is a flawed team stuck in the toughest part of its schedule. They have lost five out of six games, and last week’s match against Xavier stands out as the only game in which they seemed to be missing out.
The Red Storm are still the team that will determine their NCAA Tournament fate, but they no longer have the margin of error that they had just two weeks ago. They need to start winning games.
Facing DePaul, arguably the worst of all the Power 6 teams, would be a useful start on Tuesday. But after that, eight games await. It’s hard to believe they’d still be on the right side of the bubble even if they won less than five.
“I think we’re pretty close,” Pitino said, and he’s right. The Johnnies were right there with Creighton and Marquette, and they fought until the final moments the first time they played UW in Hartford.
“They’re No. 1 in the country. They’re better than us,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we can’t beat a team ranked 15th. We hope we can get there someday.”
That’s it.
For now, the reality is that St. John’s is squarely in the coaches section of the Big East, with the curtain fully drawn between them and the triumvirate of Huskies, Blue Jays, and Golden Eagles, returning them to first-class seats. There is.
That means you have to get to the other side of this. That means, at a minimum, winning all four remaining games against the league’s remnants, DePaul and Georgetown, and perhaps two of the remaining three games against Providence, Seton Hall and Butler. , all of which will be judged strictly at the same time on Selection Sunday.
And it would help to take one of the two remaining games against conference powerhouses on the schedule, either next Saturday at Marquette or at home against Creighton on Feb. 25.
In fact, what it mostly means is, “They need to start playing better.” It was a good enough performance for 28 minutes Saturday afternoon, and the Garden certainly felt like great home court advantage during that period.
The last 12 songs sound like Gampel Pavilion South, which is exactly what it sounds like when there are 19,812 people and two cheering squads in the room.
“This program here is well on its way to competing at the top of the league,” Hurley, a perennial honor winner, said of St. John’s. “There’s going to be some great battles here over the next few years. I’m looking forward to it.”
Pitino similarly took the loss in stride, reminding everyone if anyone needed a prompt that whatever the conflict between St. John’s and UW must be discussed in the future tense.
“I think we’re far from a rivalry,” he said. “This could become a rivalry someday. It’s not now.”
it’s not. But for his 28 minutes on a Saturday afternoon, you can close your eyes, let your ears do all the work, and let you be transported into a day that certainly could be. That should be enough for now.
