A New York moment in a Wolfpack atmosphere

Mike Burke

I still don’t know if I’m ready to concede Greatest College Basketball Game Ever to Thursday and Friday’s Syracuse-Connecticut Big East quarterfinal, but I’ll admit somewhere around the fourth overtime I was willing to enter it into the conversation.

Through all six overtimes of the Orange’s epic 127-117 victory over Connecticut, though, thoughts of N.C. State continued to dance through my head. Naturally the 1974 ACC final between N.C. State and Maryland (along with 1992 Duke-Kentucky, still the Ali of college hoops games) came to mind because of the insistent high level of play by both teams. But I was also reminded of the late Jim Valvano’s 1983 N.C. State Wolfpack, still the Cinderella story of all college basketball Cinderella stories.

During that magnificent and glorious run by the Wolfpack (yikes!) 26 years ago it seemed as though they were down four, six, eight points from the outset of every game. Yet they just kept hanging around, scratching along, boring the opponent back to them; then tying the score and falling down by six again before pulling out an improbable and heartwarming victory.

There’s nothing Cinderella about Syracuse, of course, nor is there anything heartwarming about Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim for the very reasons he’s one of my favorite coaches. No, Boeheim is not warm and fuzzy the way the great Jimmy V was. Rather, the Syracuse coach, who during games is remindful of the old Saturday Night Live character Doug Whiner, is droll, sarcastic, succinct and clever — the kind of guy all guys fancy themselves as being.

So when the game finally ended on Friday morning, 3 hours and 46 minutes after it began, Boeheim wasn’t rushing around the court looking for somebody to hug ala Valvano. He simply got his kids off the court and prepared to go back to the hotel, summing up the evening in typical Boeheim fashion: “It would have been a lot better if they just counted Eric’s shot and we could have gone home two hours ago.”

For those of you who lead normal and productive lives (happily, I don’t) and who were already hours into your slumber early Friday morning, what Boeheim was referring to was the shot the Orange’s Eric Devendorf nailed from nearly 30 feet to seemingly give Syracuse the win in regulation. But alas for Devendorf, and fortunately for history, he let the shot go just as the red lights around the backboard went off at the final buzzer.

The play was reviewed, as are all shots near the end of halves, and officials watched replay after replay before finally ruling the shot was late, sending the game into the first of the six five-minute overtimes.

From there, N.C. State, er, Syracuse kept falling behind to begin each overtime, but kept hanging with Connecticut, before doing something boring and improbable at the conclusion of each of the first five overtimes to force another. Finally, with around 3:00 left in the sixth, the Orange began to create some space for the win, but not before UConn gave it one more charge in the final minute or so.

It was a game of attrition as neither team quit and both coaches shuffled to find players to replace the eight players who had fouled out. In fact, at the beginning of the sixth overtime, Hot Couch reporter Kevin Stewart texted, “UConn’s 2011 recruiting class just checked into the game.” Which is why Hot Couch Guy and I get along so well. He has no life either.

It was wonderful late-night, early-morning sports theater, so what better place for it to play out than in New York, the city that never sleeps, and in Madison Square Garden, the world’s most famous arena? Most of the sellout crowd of 19,375 were still there for the sixth overtime, and like the players and coaches seemed exhausted and stupefied by what they had just witnessed — or been a part of. Why a New York crowd hadn’t been this emotionally spent from a real sense of having participated, rather than having witnessed, since one James Scott Connors raged through all of those late-night five setters at the U.S. Open just down Broadway in Flushing Meadows.

Hardly a New York minute, the Syracuse-Connecticut game produced quite the New York moment. It wasn’t Greensboro where Lefty’s Terps and Stormin’ Norman’s Wolfpack made history 35 years ago. It wasn’t The Pit in Albuquerque, where Valvano frantically raced the court looking for somebody to hug. But the Orange and the Huskies certainly evoked thoughts of another example for one and all that will forever be linked to North Carolina State.

Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up.

Mike Burke is sports editor of the Cumberland Times-News. Contact Mike Burke at mburke@times-news.com.