At the final buzzer Saturday, Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim stood with his hands hanging by his side and sighed. He is 68 now, and there is little he has not seen. Even a victory that sends his team to the Final Four, as Saturday's 55-39 victory over Marquette did, elicits not exaltation but exhalation.
"I'm happy; I'm thrilled," Boeheim said in a flat voice that sounded neither happy nor thrilled.
But he let a wry smile envelop his long, angular face when the topic was longevity and its usefulness.
"Yeah, I'm coaching as I always have, and there's something to say for that," Boeheim said. "As a younger coach, you change some things; as you get older, you don't change a lot."
Saturday's game was a 40-minute acknowledgment of what has not changed. While it was a given that a Big East Conference team was going to advance to the Final Four on Saturday, it was highly symbolic that it was Syracuse, because that means the Big East as we have known it will live for another day.
Saturday's was an ugly game if you like to see players succeed at things like shooting the basketball, but it could also be viewed as a time capsule moment for a disappearing genre: an old-fashioned Big East basketball game.
On Saturday, so much looked familiar. There was Syracuse in its 2-3 zone, a wide, impenetrable Orange sea wall repulsing any foray into the lane. There were the customary players recruited to Syracuse to play that zone: athletic guards and long-armed forecourt players who combined to make Marquette look clueless, stagnant and unimaginative on offense.
Syracuse's conservative, fuddy-duddy zone has been doing this to teams since President Obama, who was at Saturday's game, was in high school. The names change for Syracuse, the uniform shorts get longer, but Boeheim is still on the sideline yelling commands in his whiny voice to a defense that has few holes and fears only a hot outside shooter.
The Syracuse defenders stand with their hands in the air, mimicking Boeheim, who is doing the same thing in front of the bench, and they wait for a miss. When that result comes, as it did roughly 77 percent of the time Saturday, a gangly Syracuse player grabs the rebound and a gaggle of orange-clad players runs the floor and finishes with a flourish.
It could have been 1983, or 2003. It was 2013 with Syracuse in the Final Four again. Old-style Big East basketball gets another day in the sun.
"I hope Syracuse wins the national championship," said Marquette Coach Buzz Williams, whose hardy team was forced into dozens of poor shots. "We will miss not having them in our league. I'm definitely rooting for Syracuse."
The Big East — the original Big East — and its legacy has been on Boeheim's mind as well. His team may be heading to the Atlantic Coast Conference, but he cannot let his roots go, or doesn't want to. On Friday, almost without prompting, Boeheim was reminiscing about the birth of the Big East.
"It's remarkable that you could start a league and it could be good right away, like the Big East was," he said. "We had the right schools, the right players came in early," he added, referring to stars like Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin and Pearl Washington.
"It's been an unbelievable 34 years. Over that 34-year period it's been as good as any league. You can easily make that argument."
Saturday's game, in which Syracuse shot only 38 percent from the field, will not make many basketball fans across the nation wax nostalgic for those time-honored, bruising Big East games. But it had its moments and it captured the intensity that was always evident in pivotal Big East games, back when the conference was regional and gritty and the play resembled the kind of rough-and-tumble pickup games typical of the Northeast urban areas the league represented.
There was a lot of pushing and shoving Saturday, and harsh words were exchanged. Players fell on top of one another and dived into the stands. The coaches gave the referees an earful in ways that Louie Carnesecca and John Thompson would have enjoyed. Boeheim knows all about that, having been there then and now. He is going to the Final Four for a fourth time, and in each of the previous trips he has advanced to the national championship, winning it once.
Reminded of that in the postgame minutes of Saturday evening, Boeheim sighed again. He then gave a revealing explanation — one that might describe all the sighing.
"I've told the players that when you make the Final Four, it's obviously a great reason to be happy," he said. "But if you don't win at the Final Four, you will be more unhappy than you would have been if you'd lost today."
So that is where Jim Boeheim is today. He's happy to be in the Final Four, happy the old guard of the Big East is still alive. But he knows too well that there are games left to play.
"The Final Four is great," he said, his eyes both darting and wary. "But I've lost two final games there, and it's not a good feeling."
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