There were 20 seconds left, then 15, and then the decibel level inside the Pope Physical Education Center had jumped from the inside of Eric Clapton’s amplifier to the inside of a 747 jet.
With 10 seconds left, a splendid guard for St. Francis College named Brent Jones dribbled a few times, handed the ball to a teammate, Yunus Hopkinson, sought out his coach, Glenn Braica, gave him a hug, tried to say something, but it was impossible to hear anything over the ruckus.
“It felt,” Jalen Cannon said, “like last year, when we played at Syracuse.”
The Carrier Dome can seat 35,000 for a basketball game. The Pope P.E. Center can fit 34,000 fewer than that. Don’t tell your eardrums that. If you were witness to those final few seconds bleeding off the clock Wednesday night during this Northeast Conference quarterfinal, securing St. Francis’ satisfying 79-70 victory over LIU in this Bonus Battle of Brooklyn, you know it’s hard to imagine basketball sounding louder than that.
Or better than that. Depending on which bench you’re sitting on.
“I’ve coached at Cameron,” Braica said, referring to Duke’s secular basketball basilica. “I’ve been at the Carrier Dome. And I’m telling you: these little gyms are worse.”
Or better. Depending on which side of the scoreboard you’re occupying.
And that’s a good thing for these St. Francis Terriers, who won their 22nd game of the season, who now sit two victories away from the first NCAA Tournament bid in school history, who will play those games, for as long as they keep winning, in these cozy, comforting confines.
You know the roster: five schools who were Division I in 1948 when Division I was invented have yet to qualify. Army was knocked out of the Patriot League Tournament by Navy earlier in the week, so the Cadets will stay on the list. Citadel and Northwestern need miracle (and damn near impossible) runs through the Southern and Big Ten Tournaments, so they’re both likely to stay on the list.
William & Mary tied for first in the Colonial. The Tribe should have fallen off the list last year, blew a late lead in the conference final, and while they have a good shot to do it this year, they’ll play their CAA Tournament games on a neutral court in Baltimore.
St. Francis will not even have to venture off campus, unless some of the players want to make a pilgrimage to the Nathan’s stand around the corner. They’ll never have to leave their dorms, their locker room, their tiny, tidy gym, where 972 people squeezed themselves in Wednesday night, where they shouted themselves hoarse, where they attached themselves to this brilliant quest.
“They were so into the game,” said Cannon, the school’s all-time leading scorer and rebounder, who had 15 points and 15 rebounds in what was surely the most important game of his career. “They really pumped us up.”
And it showed. LIU hopped to a 10-2 lead, and when that happens it isn’t a stretch to wonder how many of the ghosts swirling around a program might pay a visit. There was the 20-point lead with 14 minutes left in the NEC title game against Monmouth 14 years ago, squandered a memory still fresh and raw all these Marches later. There are the three lonely NIT banners hanging on one wall of the Pope Center. Heck, there was even an ominous good stat: since 1984, No. 1 seeds in this tournament were 31-0 against No. 8 seeds.
Only Braica, to his eternal credit, has insisted the thing that might most fascinate outsiders about this team and its historic quest absolutely has no bearing on the way the coach and the players attack the precious present, the day-to-day, the details and the minutiae and the intricacies of a winning basketball culture.
“We know how hard it is to win one possession at a time in this league, let alone one game at a time, let alone anything else,” said Braica, once Norm Roberts’ right-hand man at St. John’s and now a curator of his own fine New York basketball tale in Brooklyn Heights. “Look, if our best is good enough, then that’s great. If not? That’s life.”
Two more games like this from his seniors, from Cannon and from Jones (31 points, five assists), with a thousand voices trying to chase the bad guys out of the gym, out onto Remsen Street … well, they don’t want to look ahead just yet. And who can blame them? After 67 years, what’s a few more days?