The season ended badly. There is no disputing that. Selection Sunday can be cruel that way. It was St. Patrick’s Day, too, remember, and so it felt like a wonderful and festive stage for St. John’s to appear in the bracket for the first time in five years. But the weird stuff had already started.
The Johnnies had done as much as they could do. They’d beaten Seton Hall in the Big East quarterfinals March 14 and were believed, almost by acclimation, to have elbowed their way in. And it didn’t look like they’d hurt themselves at all the next day, either, when they gave UConn the last competitive 40 minutes the Huskies would see all season, losing 95-90.
But there is a price to pay for dwelling so close to the bubble. By late Saturday, results all over the country came pouring in, and almost all of them were unhelpful to St. John’s. Same thing happened Sunday. These are the moments when a road trip to Dayton, Ohio, suddenly seems more welcome than two weeks in Hawaii.
These are the moments when fans become as familiar with Joe Lunardi, Jerry Palm, and Michael DeCourcy as they are with their spouses. More bad results — “We’re last four in!” — and then the excruciating wait ’til 6 o’clock — “Lunardi has us out! Palm has us in!” — and then, at the end …
“I think we’re one of the best 68 teams in America,” Rick Pitino said that night, on the other side of 7 o’clock, after the NCAA had officially disagreed with that assessment, when Johnnies fans began canceling their reservations at the Dayton Marriott, when it turned out they weren’t even one of the last four teams on the outside.
“This is devastating to our players,” Pitino said then, “but it is what it is.”
This is the sour taste that has been swirling through the mouths of St. John’s fans for 7 ½ months. This is why Monday night’s opener against Fordham at Carnesecca Arena — a nice old-school city battle that’ll be a hell of a lid-lifter for Keith Urgo’s Rams in addition to Pitino’s Red Storm — has been so anticipated for so long.
For one thing, Pitino’s previous five collegiate stops — and the Knicks, too — all showed significant improvement in Year 2. We live in different times, and so this will be a different kind of Year 2 for Pitino. There is more talent in Jamaica now than there was last year. Kadary Richmond is the most intriguing name, a Johnnie now after being a Seton Hall Pirate last year (and a Syracuse Orange before that).
We don’t bring up Richmond’s busy résumé for any other reason than to emphasize why this Year 2 will be different for Pitino, why it’ll be different for everyone in college basketball this year and in the uncertain years to come.
All across the country, these are the conversations fans are having with each other:
“How do you think we’ll do this year?”
“I think we’ll be good!”
“Who’s our starting five?”
“Why it’s … there’s … um …”
(Grabs phone, clicks on http://www.StateU.com/athletics, looks for familiar names, finds none.)
The Johnnies should be good. They looked awfully good against Rutgers, which enters the season as our area’s highest-expectation team thanks to Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey, beating the Scarlet Knights 91-85 in an exhibition game. On paper, it does seem this version of St. John’s better mirrors Pitino’s usual teams than last year’s team did, at least until the very end.
“I like this team,” Pitino said last week. “I think they play hard; they have good chemistry. I think they’re good defensively. We’re deep; we’re very athletic; we’ve had two great exhibition games against very good competition [adding Towson as well].”
We start getting answers Monday at Carnesecca Arena. We start getting a sense if the Johnnies can break streaks of five years (since making the tournament), nine years (since avoiding Dayton) and 25 years (since winning an NCAA game).
All of that is for later.
For now, there is Fordham, and there is an anxious college basketball crowd wanting to know if it can invest itself in the Johnnies the way it used to. There was some of that last year, enough moments at Carnesecca and at the Garden to tease you about what’s still possible. On Monday, we’ll get a sense of what’s still possible.
