Siena
I grew up within walking distance of Siena’s old campus basketball arena—the one they played in until 1995, when they permanently moved the games to the big arena in downtown Albany—and when the weather was nice we would sometimes walk, since the parking lot was absurdly small for the 3000 people they always packed into that tiny place.
I have seen unbelievable highs with this team—Marc Brown scoring 32 as we won as a #14 seed in 1989, our first NCAA appearance; making the tourney three straight times, 2008-2010; taking #1 Louisville to the wire in the second round in 2009, surely our best team ever.
And I’ve seen miserable lows—losing in the first round of the conference tournament as the #1 seed in 1988; watching the team fall apart multiple times as great coach after great coach left for bigger schools. Deane to Marquette. Hewitt to Georgia Tech. Orr to Seton Hall. McCaffrey to Iowa. It’s just how it goes in the mid-majors. And almost certainly how it’s going to go when Gerry Mac leaves for Syracuse.
I’ve seen us absolutely smoke power conference teams in the first round of the tourney (Vanderbilt, 2008). And I’ve seen us get absolutely smoked in the first round (Arkansas, 1998).
But I’ve never seen anything like today.
It really felt like we had them. Duke. We had them. Five MAAC starters go the whole 40 and take down Duke. It was right there. I was pacing around my living room the entire game, but it was as much giddy as nervous. I was sane enough to live blog. We had them.
Utterly outplayed them in the first half. Not Hung In There. Not Battled. Just Absolutely Blew Them Out Of The Gym. A buddy texted me, “why do we look like an ACC team right now?” This wasn’t even a good Siena team. A mediocre conference season. Zero quality non-conference wins. No depth. It was impossible to watch that first half and reconcile it with Duke losing just 1 ACC game this year, and Siena losing 7 MAAC games.
Played considerably worse in the 2nd half, but still good enough to win. It wasn’t the classic low-seed-falls-apart second half. Part of that was the double-digit halftime cushion; part of it was that we stemmed the original Duke run in the second half, and the second one, rebuilding most of the halftime lead twice.
No, we just went cold on open looks and made a few dumb errors and Duke played pretty darn good for the last seven minutes. But a roll here or a call there and we pull it out. Damn.
You can play “what if” a million ways with these games, but two stand out for me. What if we don’t miss two consecutive dunks that would have put us up 15 with 17 minutes to go, instead of giving Duke a dunk that cuts it to 11? And what if Doty doesn’t twist his ankle on that loose ball rundown with 7 minutes left?
There’s an alternative timeline where enough goes right and it becomes the most famous game in tournament history. You can even see it if you squint hard enough. I certainly can. The team racing around the court. Duke sulking away. A media circus for the next two days. Gerry Mac doing four thousand interviews. It will surely all play out as I fall asleep tonight.
But no. The merry-go-round stops here. A single news cycle in the tournament. A late sentence in the stories about Gerry Mac when he eventually wins a title at Syracuse. And a second half I’ll think about repeatedly, for the rest of my life.
And ugh. Duke. It had to be Duke.