Finally, a sliver of well-deserved hope in a lost St. John’s season
It was one game, yes. That’s truth. That’s fact.
The 11 games that preceded it? The 11 losses stretching back before Christmas, the near-misses and the no-contests, the Big East oh-fer, all of it a big, blurry basketball fog? Those are all part of the permanent record, too.
But maybe — just maybe — this one game, this one Saturday afternoon at Madison Square Garden, is a hint that there’s life yet in the old bear, in the St. John’s basketball team, which had no business sharing a court with the fourth-ranked Duke Blue Devils yet somehow walked off that court with an 81-77 victory.
“We got what we deserved,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said.
But make no mistake: the Johnnies got what they deserved, too. This has been an impossible team to figure for most of this season. It played so well out of conference, twice threw scares into top-10 stalwart Xavier, gave No. 1 Villanova a solid game at the Garden.
But still: 11-13 is 11-13. And 0-11 is 0-11.
“I’m happy for the guys,” St. John’s coach Chris Mullin said. “They needed it more than anything.”
It is what this program needed, too, as much as anything. As the losses mounted, the helplessness did too. Nobody expected Mullin’s return to his Utopia Parkway kingdom to be a magic elixir, but nobody figured on 0-11 in the Big East in Year 3, either. It has been hard for Mullin’s guys, yes, but it has been just as hard for the faithful to keep their faith.
So this was for them, too, for the locals who packed the Garden and tried to outshout the Dookies, who really seemed to shake the Blue Devils at key moments in the second half.
“The month of January was rough for us,” forward Tariq Owens said. “But Coach never stopped preaching to us and we never left the gym and finally it paid off.”
It paid off. Shamorie Ponds saw to it with a 33-point masterpiece, and the Johnnies forced fans all across America to blink as the score crawled across the bottom of their television screens.
It’s one game, yes. Two years ago, St. John’s hammered a Syracuse team bound for the Final Four and it proved merely an outlier. Maybe this will be the same thing.
Or maybe it won’t be. If you care about St. John’s, and about college basketball in this city, it really is the only way to root.