THEY tried to sell Storrs, Conn., as the capital of basketball America yesterday, the place where you had to be if you wanted a preview of the madness to come.
Connecticut and Villanova met there, and they are two of the four best teams in the country, a couple of likely No. 1 seeds in the NCAA Tournament.
That, the basketball cognoscenti insisted, was the pilgrimage you had to make if you sought solace from frigid February, a Sunday slugfest in the New England woods.
UConn won the game. The citizens of Connecticut rejoiced. And not one thing changed in the lives of either team. It was a fun game. It wasn’t everything.
If you wanted everything yesterday, then you had to come to Riverdale. You had to come to The Bronx. You had to come to Draddy Gymnasium, squeezed yourself into its cozy confines alongside 2,344 others, and you had to declare yourself with colors: green and white or maroon and gold. And good luck to you if you opted for maroon and gold.
Every now and again, it’s good for the soul to remind yourself that while the final weeks of March belong to the Connecticuts and the Villanovas, the final hours of February are the province of schools like Manhattan and Iona, schools that harbor just as many ambitions as the factories do, but do it in a different way.
A better way, in a lot of ways.
And so the signs went up early at Draddy yesterday, signs warning you that if you came here without a ticket, you could either drive home and pick the game up on TV, or you could risk frostbite and hope someone would show up with a spare ducat in his pocket. That wasn’t likely to happen. It still didn’t stop a few brave souls.
“You got a spare?” one of them asked, his words muffled by a scarf that made the request sound like this: “Ygttspre?” Patron after patron passed him.
The kids in the Jasper cheering section showed up early, warming up with verbal volleys thrown at the women’s game that came first. They came wearing green-and-white Cat in the Hat stocking caps, and some of them actually brought green-and-white T-shirts, too, though they quickly vanished so their body-painted message could quickly greet Iona during the layup line:
“LET’S GO JASPERS!”
And in the opposite corner, packed tightly together like lemmings, were the brave undergraduates of New Rochelle, some of them also subscribing to the shirt-optional protocol, getting their own larynxes in game shape by warming up during the dying moments of Iona’s win in the women’s game:
“IT’S ALL OVER!”
Sometimes you can get lucky in this game. Sometimes, the schedule smiles on you, and the season plays out just right, and so the last regularseason game of a championship season will come down to two teams, each with matching conference records of 13-4, needing this one game to facilitate the best kind of basketball reams.
Let’s be frank about this: For all the hype that the pundits attached to that UConn-Villanova, here’s what was at stake at Gampel Pavilion: nothing.
At Draddy, an entire season was reduced to one vigorous 40-minute test. The winner received a doublebye directly to the semifinals of next week’s MAAC Tournament, a platinum prize in a single-bid league. It also guaranteed it a spot somewhere in postseason play, since the NIT’s new selection system assures midmajor regular-season champions a slot.
These stakes might seem laughably low in some basketball precincts. In Draddy yesterday, where the standing-room only crowd stood for as long as their legs could stand it, they are everything. No matter what happened last night, neither Iona nor Manhattan will still be playing on the first weekend of April.
But on the last weekend of February, that was all right. That, in fact, was perfect.a lot more.”
