PHOENIX — So the Huxtables will stay right where they are, in the provinces of our memory. So will the kids from “The Breakfast Club” and “Raspberry Beret” and all the rest of our 1985 reference points.
The Big East will not be repeating its greatest feat this weekend, it will not be turning the clock back 24 years and trying conjure cozy Rupp Arena into spacious Ford Field. Louisville — which, I’m sorry, will always be linked far more permanently to the old Metro Conference than the Big East — spoiled that party yesterday, someone evidently forgetting to inform the Cardinals that they didn’t get a bye into the Final Four.
Louisville’s appalling no-show against Michigan State notwithstanding, it is still a day to rejoice for outgoing Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese, the man who was in every room for every meeting alongside Dave Gavitt when the league was being born 30 years ago, the man who refused to allow the league to die on his watch a few years ago when a spate of defections threatened to push it toward irrelevance, at best, and extinction, at worst.
No, Tranghese reinvented the conference, and if its 16 teams at times seem more burden than boon, his final year of stewardship seemed to justify all that he did in making sure the league would outlive its most tireless booster and benefactor.
From start to finish this season, the Big East set the agenda in college basketball, at one time having five of the top 11 teams in the AP poll, ultimately earning three No. 1 seeds, an unprecedented (and unlikely to be duplicated) feat that isn’t at all diminished by the fact that two of them — Pittsburgh and Louisville — failed to make it out of the regionals.
If anything, those failures underscored just how difficult a minefield the league really was. A lesser team than Pitt would never have survived the three scares it received on the way to the East Regional final, and even then it took a forever shot by Villanova’s Scotty Reynolds to finally still the Panthers’ oversized hearts. And though Louisville will rue yesterday’s second half against Michigan State (though few others will, as it sets up a wonderful hometown hero participant this weekend in Detroit), the fact that the Cardinals won both the Big East’s regular season and tournament titles with a less-than-Final-Four-caliber backcourt is in itself a remarkable feat.
In the end, the Big East will have to settle for two of the Final Four after having five of the final 16 and perhaps it is best that those two, Connecticut and Villanova, are among the classic lineup of teams that made the Big East what it was back in the day.
Connecticut was an original member, and Villanova joined a year later, and together they still have a chance to bring one last element of 1985 to life next week: an all-Big East final.
If the Big East still means as much to you as it once did, then that’s a fine rooting interest to bring into the Motor City. And not a bad consolation prize at all.
