MSG love nearly stacks up to win
FINALLY, the Garden bared its teeth, cleared its throat and carried St. John’s on its shoulders. Finally, the old gymnasium on top of Penn Station felt like a home court again, the best home court, the one we remember when the Johnnies were treated here like princes of the basketball city.
Villanova tried to bully St. John’s, tried to chase it out of the gym. The Johnnies wouldn’t be bullied. They wouldn’t be chased. For a while, it seemed they would be. For a while, it felt like the Wildcats weren’t just going to win for a 13th straight time in New York against New York’s college team, they were going to bury them, humiliate them.
But the Johnnies wouldn’t be buried. They refused to be humiliated.
Now here was Shamorie Ponds taking an inbound pass with 2.1 seconds to go, the scoreboard frozen in favor of the home team — St. John’s 71, Villanova 65 — and now the band struck up, and if the red-cloaked faction of the 19,812 seemed to greet the final buzzer with something of a muted roar, it was probably because they were all hoarse.
They’d all lent their voice boxes to the cause. There was nothing left to shout.
And now they would flood onto Seventh Avenue and 33rd Street and beyond, sore-throated but happy. We’d started to wonder about the Garden and St. John’s. Georgetown had beaten them here last month. A mediocre Providence team had throttled them here last week. The Johnnies looked like strangers here.
On Sunday, they looked like princes again. And played like kings. “The crowd got going,” Villanova coach Jay Wright said, “and the environment got heated.”
Here was the trophy St. John’s has been seeking all year. It may well be that the two wins they already own against Marquette might have come against a better team. But Villanova is still Villanova, still the bell cow of the Big East, and this will almost certainly carry water in 27 days, on Selection Sunday. From now on, they play for the seed line.
FFrom now on, they officially know thethey belong in the same sentence as the most accomplished team in their coconference. They can play with the WWildcats. Which means they should be able to play with just about anybobody.
“We’ve played a lot of good teams ththis year,” Wright said. “And they’re as good as any of them.”
The Johnnies were down 29-10 at one point and looked like they were going to be down 14 at the half until Justin Simon rattled home a threequarters-court heave at the halftime buzzer. But they still trailed 48-38 with just under 12 minutes left when a couple of things happened.
First, Wright got called for a technical foul, and even as the referee pointed at him, it felt like something had changed. The coolas-Fonzarelli Wright had been rattled. The unflappable coach had been flapped.
“The technical hurt us,” Wright admitted. “It happens sometimes.”
More useful to the Jonnies’ cause, though, was that suddenly the basket seemed as wide as the Central Park reservoir, and on defense, they suddenly seemed a half-step faster, a half-step quicker. Villanova has seen it all. And looked lost in the forest.
“The energy was crazy,” said Mutstapha Heron, who scored 19 points and made a couple of enormous 3s during that second-half surge. “The crowd was amped and we gave them what they deserved.”
Said Mullin, who back in the day used to make the Garden feel exactly this wayy so many times all by himself: “That was as loud as I can remember, maybe louder. I’m happy these guys were able to experience that. There’s nothing like that. A full Garden, against a championship team like Villanova? There’s nothing like that.”
No. There isn’t. St. John’s waited a long time for a game like this, a moment like this, when they could turn the big gym on top of Penn Station into the very best homecourt again. For one splendid afternoon, it was that and so much more. Princes of the basketball city again.