Jim Boeheim remembers thinking, as he focused on the crowd in the Carrier Dome Monday night, that he was witnessing something he had not seen in his 34 years as Syracuse’s head coach.
Perhaps it had been there before, and he had just missed it?
No. No. That couldn’t be it. It was too big. And, well, too familiar. It was a giant, cardboard cutout of the face of one James Arthur Boeheim.
“Now why would anybody want to do that?” Boeheim said. “I don’t even like to look at myself when I’m shaving.”
This is what happens in a season without nicks and cuts, a ridiculously smooth season no one saw coming — not even the guy with the little ego, and now, the big head.
The Orange, having lost Paul Harris, Eric Devendorf and Jonny Flynn, were picked sixth in the Big East preseason poll. Then Syracuse crushed North Carolina 87-71 in the Garden to go to 4-0 and the college basketball world began gushing Orange.
“I didn’t have a clue we’d be this good,” said Boeheim, 67.
No one did. Look at the starting five. Boeheim doesn’t have a starter who was a consensus Top 50 high school recruit:
* Wes Johnson, just the fifth transfer from a four-year school that Boeheim has taken, was on an AAU ‘B’ team and sat out last season after transferring from Iowa State.
* Guard Andy Rautins sat out the 2007-08 season after blowing out his left knee playing for Team Canada.
* Freshman point guard Brandon Triche scared off some recruiters after blowing out his left knee in high school.
* Center Arinze Onuaku played on a prep team in suburban Virginia that went 12-11.
* Big man Rick Jackson was Scout.com’s No. 58-rated recruit in 2007.
The bench primarily consists of Canadian export Kris Joseph and guard Scoop Jardine, who missed last season with a stress fracture in his leg.
If Syracuse wins the NCAA title, it would be the first team to do so without a McDonald’s All-American since Maryland in 2002.
Johnson, barely recruited out of high school in Texas, truly has emerged as a collegiate All-American candidate and is the biggest reason for the Orange’s growth.
“Don’t get me wrong, there have been a lot of great players at Syracuse, but it’s not like at North Carolina where Jimmy’s bringing in five All-Americans every year,” Villanova coach Jay Wright said. “He has an unbelievable knack for finding guys. He’s just got a great ability to see things.”
For the longest time even the most diehard Syracuse fan was wondering what Boeheim saw. The 1987 team, led by Rony Seikaly, Derrick Coleman and Sherman Douglas, was arguably his most talented.
But Coleman didn’t get out on Keith Smart’s game-winning corner jumper and Bobby Knight’s Hoosiers beat Syracuse in the 1987 NCAA title game in the Superdome.
It took 16 years — during which time a No. 2-seeded Orange suffered a first-round NCAA tournament loss to Richmond in 1991 and John Wallace hauled the Orange to the 1996 title game, only to lose 76-67 to Kentucky at the Meadowlands — before Boeheim got back to New Orleans in 2003.
In that game, Hakim Warrick rose up like a Na’vi warrior in “Avatar” and blocked Michael Lee’s corner jumper to give Syracuse an 81-78 victory over Kansas and its first national championship.
“Same court, same corner,” Boeheim said. “[Smart’s shot] just meant I had to live with being an idiot for another 15 years or whatever.”
Idiot? Notice Boeheim’s 2-3 zone — the one he has been using since 1976, when, without having spent one season as a head coach on any level, he was promoted from assistant to head coach — has changed. It no longer is the passive, stagnant defense that sat back, allowing teams to live or die from the perimeter.
The 3-point shot forced Boeheim to expand the zone. Now they trap the corners and the foul line extended.
Syracuse, playing zone defense, is fourth in the nation in steals, which leads to fast breaks and is a huge reason the Orange are No. 1 in field-goal shooting.
Boeheim, who often answers his own office phone, seems to give a verbal shrug when the talk shifts to his team’s success.
“We’ll see how it turns out,” he said.
How it turns out? What could go wrong? Well, the ever-cautious Boeheim clearly remembers past failures.
“We lost to Rochester East in triple overtime in the 1962 sectionals,” Boeheim said, referring to his high school playing days at Lyons Central High School in Upstate New York.
“We’d beaten Rochester West, a city school, 72-36 and they had beaten East, a small class ’B’ school,” added Boeheim, not having to look up the year or the score. “We were up 13-2 after the first quarter and we just let up. I’ll never forget that loss.”
Never?
“Not until I close my eyes for the last time,” he said.
Nevertheless, this is no time to be entertaining such maudlin thoughts.
For just the third time in Boeheim’s 34 seasons, Syracuse has gotten off to a 21-1 start. Yesterday’s win at DePaul, combined with Kentucky’s recent loss at South Carolina, could vault the Orange to their first No. 1 ranking since the 1989-90 season.
There’s no Rochester East in the NCAA tournament. And even if there were, Boeheim should be strutting around like a “Jersey Shore” cast member. No one expected this success either.
“The first word that comes to mind when I think of him is brilliant,” said former Syracuse star Leo Rautins, Andy’s father. “He sees things in players and in teams. It’s almost magical the way things fall into place.”
lenn.robbins@nypost.com
