McCaffery

ers. No task was more important in all of those seasons than beating the DePaul press Sunday. For in it, just as always, Perretta was just another Delaware County working man trying to get something done.

“I remember the first day I met Dave Gavitt and Mike Tranghese,” he said, of two of the early commissioners and architects of the Big East. “I had my work boots on because I had been laying cement. That’s what I did. I was part-time here. So I would lay cement and come to practice.

“It’s been a long time since that day.”

Perretta was hired at age 22, two months after his graduation from Lycoming College, four years after his success as a rigged swingman at Monsignor Bonner High. A severe ankle injury ending his playing career as a college freshman, he had been coaching Lycoming’s junior varsity men’s team. At the time, laying cement at dawn and trying to construct what would become a nationally relevant basketball program at dusk seemed as good a way as any to make a living. Now, he’s 64, makes about a halfa-million a year, and still stresses about every play call. That was him Sunday, with seconds left in a double-figure victory, up on the sidelines imploring his players to keep their defense tight against a DePaul inbound play.

He was the same way in 1978, when the games were just as important to those involved, and the stress was just as real for the college-aged coach brandishing the whiteboard.

“I know we used to play Immaculata and those schools when I first started,” Perretta said. “Then, there was ‘small college’ and ‘large college.’ We were considered small college. Immaculata. West Chester. Those were big games at the beginning.

“When we beat Immaculata, that was a gigantic win. West Chester too. Because those were the perennial powers before the scholarships and the big programs started taking over.”

By 1982, Perretta had Villanova in the Final Four of the AIAW, which governed the women’s game before the NCAA assumed control in 1983. As the women’s game grew, Villanova’s program kept pace, with Perretta’s teams earning 11 NCAA Tournament berths and five Big East championships.

With a signature victory over DePaul Sunday, the Cats were at 1611. A 12th NCAA Tournament remains possible, though it probably would require road victories at both Creighton and Providence, then a push into the later rounds of the Big East Tournament. It’s more likely the Cats will play in the WNIT for the 12th time under Perretta, and, if so, they would have a chance for another home game or more.

Yet as it stood Sunday afternoon, Perretta had no guarantee of coaching again on the Finneran floor. He’d announced prior to the season that this would be his last. Given a chance Sunday to publicly reconsider, he passed. With assorted aches preventing him in recent years from standing through an entire practice session, he figures it is time to allow someone else to add to the foundation he smoothed into place.

Perretta is not ruling out being an assistant to

the right program, but will not burden the next Villanova coach with that obligation, written or otherwise. No, by Sunday, he clearly was at peace with moving on. And that’s why those 55 former players were there for the farewell.

Better make it 56. “Shelly was praying for us,” said Perretta, of former Wildcat Shelly Pennefather, the 1987 national player of the year who would become a cloistered nun. “She wrote me a letter. She said, ‘Just so you guys know, you have a little extra help today.’”

It worked during the important victory, and it strengthened Perretta afterward, during a potentially emotional oncourt ceremony. There was a tasteful video tribute, a group photo with all of his former players, and, from a crowd of 2,421, a chorus of “Harry, Harry, Harry, Harry, Hah-ry.”

“This morning, I didn’t feel good,” Perretta said. “I was tired and nervous about all this. And I just went for a walk. One of my neighbors walked with me, and we just talked about what would happen. Father Rob (Hagan, the longtime Villanova athletic department fixture) called me. He told me I’d be fine, that I should just take deep breaths.

“Everybody was coaching me.”

That’s what coaching is, taking the moment and finding a way to make it work. That’s what Harry Perretta did Sunday in the most memorable victory of his career. Until the next one, only until the next one.