For one night, Pitt, fans relive glory days
The famous actor Bill Murray’s son, Luke, was in the house. He’s an assistant coach at Louisville. But that didn’t mean Groundhog Day was guaranteed.
Groundhog Day didn’t happen, either.
Pitt’s long basketball nightmare is over, having lasted … well, it lasted so long that no one seemed to know.
I mean, we know for sure the Panthers’ most recent, regular-season conference win was Feb. 18, 2017, against Florida State. I had that pegged at 692 days. Others thought 690.
Pitt coach Jeff Capel said 672. (Although I think he meant a win in the ACC tournament.)
Does it matter? Pitt won a game in the ACC. By the way, it was even longer since the Panthers had beaten Louisville. Try 2010 (I’m not even gonna try to count the days) with 12 consecutive losses.
“Wow, they haven’t beaten Louisville since 2010?” Capel said.
Trey McGowens & Co. put an end to all of it. Pitt’s freshman shooting guard shrugged off an early leg injury and poured in 33 points on 12-of-19 shooting in a wild, 89-86 overtime victory.
“McGowens was incredible,” Capel said.
McGowens scored the tiebreaking basket in overtime, too, rising to the basket and laying it in for an 88-86 lead as Petersen Events Center jumped like it was 2005. Basically, he played the role of Luke Murray’s dad from the film and enacted one of Phil Connors’ famous lines: “I’m not going to live by their rules anymore.”
After leaving the game for a brief period early, nursing some sort of leg injury, McGowens returned and went nuts. He scored every which way — right-handed drives, left-handed drives, 3pointers, you name it. His freshman backcourt partner and roommate, Xavier Johnson, took over for stretches in the second half and overtime, as did sophomore center Terrell Brown.
Johnson had 21 points and 10 assists. He completed several drives with impossible shots. Brown had five blocked shots and all of his 11 points after halftime. And the first guy Capel mentioned at his postgame news conference was another freshman, Au’Diese Toney, who played intense and effective defense on Louisville’s leading scorer, Jordan Nwora, who made just two of 14 shots. “Big-time,” Capel said. If you closed your eyes and listened, you could hear echoes of the early 2000s, when Pitt basketball was the hottest ticket in town. Late in the first half, for example, Brown blocked a shot at one end, and McGowens’ dashing drive at the other resulted in a three-point play, giving Pitt a 33-24 lead.
The band played. The Zoo roared. The place rocked.
That sequence repeated itself several times in the second half — notably when Johnson snuffed a Louisville rally with one of his lightning-quick forays to the basket with 11:03 left. He scored, got fouled and made the free throw.
“It’s hard to believe those two kids should be high school seniors,” Louisville coach Chris Mack said of Johnson and McGowens. “They had their way with us.”
It has been awhile since an opposing ACC coach showed up to his Petersen Events Center media session unhappy. Mack surely was that.
“I thought Jeff’s guys were a lot harder playing than our team,” Mack said. “Our defense was deplorable, and until our team plays with a little bit more dirt under its fingernails instead of playing the way we did tonight defensively, then we’ll get more ass kickings in this league.”
Whether Pitt had won or lost, the environment was striking, even if there were a number of empty seats. Last time I was here, sometime during the Stallings regime (I’ve tried to block it from memory), I interviewed a sleeping man in an empty section.
Nobody was sleeping Wednesday night. Certainly not when Louisville cut a 16-point deficit to five with 8:25 left, and Pitt responded with nine consecutive points out of timeout. And most definitely not when the Cardinals forged a 79-79 tie to force overtime (Pitt failed to get a shot off at the end of regulation).
It got dicey at times — Louisville still had a chance to tie with 1.2 seconds left — but you don’t end endless droughts without a struggle.
As his players walked off the floor after regulation, Capel sensed they were “dejected.” So he got in their faces and said, “We’re gonna win! We have to fight for five minutes!”
“We got up off the canvas,” he said.
“He said, ‘There’s 10 rounds to a fight; this is the 11th round,’” Brown said.
I mean, 692 days. Or 690 says. Or even 672 days. Do you realize how long that is?
Le’Veon Bell was an AllPro running for the Steelers 690 days ago. Ju-Ju SmithSchuster had just completed his final season at USC. Antonio Brown was showing up for work. Capel was an assistant coach at Duke. Mack was at Xavier, and Stallings had a winning record.
Sure, Pitt’s just 1-1 in the conference with an incredibly daunting schedule ahead. After what this program has been through, 1-1 looks pretty sweet.