The easy part will happen once the ball goes up. Then, it’s just playing. Then, it’s simply doing what you’ve done your whole life, on playgrounds and in driveways and in gymnasiums. First to 11 wins. Run it back. Keep running it back. Hour after hour after hour in the sun, in the snow, in the rain. Once the ball goes up, nothing else matters.
“We don’t feel any pressure,” Saint Peter’s junior point guard Matthew Lee said Thursday morning. “Even though it’s a bigger stage. It’s just basketball.”
The other stuff, fun as it has been the last few days, will go away around 7:09 Friday night, when the Saint Peter’s Peacocks will play the Purdue Boilermakers at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center. Officially the teams will compete in the “East Region Semifinal” but that’s just fancy talk. This is the Sweet 16. And never has there been a sweeter basketball tale than this one.
And that’s perfectly lovely, as is the fact that the Saint Peter’s campus sits just 92 miles away, a nice easy shot up I-95, as is the fact that other than the road-trippers from West Lafayette, Ind., the entire building will be rooting for Saint Peter’s, to say nothing of the rest of the nation. For a week, the Peacocks have probably felt like players on a movie set, waiting for a director to scream “Cut! Print it!”
But it’s no movie set Friday night. Just another basketball court. Just like the Run Baby Run Center back home, back on campus, on Montgomery Street. Just like the abandoned Marist High Gym in Bayonne, where so many of these players practiced in isolation during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just like the high school courts of North Jersey and New York City that helped nurture them.
Saint Peter’s guard Daryl Banks III throws down two of his 27 points against Kentucky on March 17, 2022. Getty Images“Honestly,” senior guard and folk hero Doug Edert said, “there’s nothing to be scared of.”
Saint Peter’s doesn’t scare. We saw it last week. We’ve heard it all week. We’ve seen the Jersey billboard featuring coach Shaheen Holloway’s equal-part-defiant-and-delightful words: “I got guys from New Jersey and New York City. You think we’re scared of anything?” It won’t be about fear. Don’t worry about that.
Two other times, a 15th seed has squeezed through the first weekend, landed in the Sweet 16. The first one, the 2013 Florida Gulf Coast Eagles, were a rollicking road show known as “Dunk City” that actually led Florida early in its regional semifinal before the Gators rolled them with a 16-0 run. But the Eagles never lost their swagger.
A year ago, Oral Roberts had an even more tantalizing taste. After stunning Ohio State and Florida, the Eagles led Arkansas by as many as 12 points in the second half before a desperate Razorbacks rally saved the day for the Hogs. Those Golden Eagles never lost their swagger, either.
The Peacocks? They know what awaits. They know history beckons. But that would be the case even without the added trivia of being a 15th seed. Just being in the Sweet 16 is an opportunity few college players experience, and there are few examples more bittersweet than Holloway.
It was 22 years ago that Seton Hall made a run to the Sweet 16 — the last such spurt by any of our area schools, in fact. Holloway was the star of that team, which started the tournament as a No. 10 seed and took out both No. 7 Oregon and No. 2 Temple. But Holloway sprained his ankle against the Owls. For five long days he desperately tried to get the ankle healthy. He never did. He watched in civvies as the Pirates lost 68-66 to Oklahoma State.
That night, in a disconsolate Seton Hall dressing room, Holloway had whispered, “I didn’t know it was possible to be so sad because of a basketball game.”
All these years later, Holloway is reluctant to wallow too much in nostalgia — “I want this to be about the players, not me,” he said — but it is also clear he wants his kids to understand that it’s OK to embrace what’s happened to them, to enjoy, to take a good, hard look around Wells Fargo around 7:08 or so, just before the ball goes up, just before it gets real again.
“If you believe in yourself,” the coach said, “anything is possible.”
They will believe. Bank on that. They will play with fearlessness and ferocity, also givens. It may not matter against the Boilermakers, who will throw two future pros at them. But then again: It shouldn’t have mattered against Kentucky, either, and it probably shouldn’t have mattered against Murray State.
Yet here they are.
