ALBANY — The people wearing green, all of them, fans and players alike, they knew better than to start any premature celebration. You kidding? If Manhattan and Iona played in someone’s driveway, with a case of Cokes on the line, every possession would still be treated like precious metal, every shot, every pass.
And now? With an NCAA Tournament bid on the line?
There were no chants of “Over-rated!” There was no taunting coming from the stands, let alone the Manhattan bench, even as the time slipped under a minute, even as the lead crept toward double-digits.
Too much respect here, too much history. Manhattan’s Donovan Kates made a free throw, missed another. Manhattan by nine, 40 seconds left. STILL no chants. No celebrating, no boasting. Not yet.
“Stay humble,” guard RaShawn Stores said. “Show respect. They’re a great team. This was a great game.”
Finally, there was this: “Mass-ee-ELL-Oh!” The first chants were directed at the coach, at Steve Masiello, who 49 weeks ago nearly saw his career go up in flames, who now, 49 weeks later, was about to lead the Jaspers to back-to-back MAAC championships.
“The greatest feeling of my life,” Masiello would say later, after he’d shed a few tears, after he’d administered a gaggle of hugs, after he and his Jaspers had accepted the MAAC Championship trophy a year after he’d left the program for South Florida, saw that job rescinded thanks to a missing college diploma on his résumé, saw the good people at Manhattan agree to let him stay and coach these players for whom he clearly has such strong, powerful feelings.
“It’s more than basketball to us,” Masiello said, his voice landscaped by the emotion of the moment, and you hear things like that a lot in the middle of March. But after seeing Manhattan and Iona bob and weave, punch and counter-punch for 40 minutes — again — it was hard to believe it could be any other way.
“We didn’t play our ‘A’ game,” Iona coach Tim Cluess said, “and they played great.”
Finally, the lead up to 11, the seconds melting away, and you could feel the Jaspers fans exhale at Times Union Center, you could see the Jaspers themselves begin to believe that this was real, it was true, it was yet another victory in a big spot, a time when the game was there to be won.
And they said: Why not? Why not us?
The final was 79-69 after it had been 60-60 with 7:01 to go, after it had seemed Iona had weathered Manhattan’s most devastating punch. The Gaels didn’t win all those regular-season games — including two against the Jaspers — in a lottery, they are a talented team, a splendidly coached team.
But the Jaspers are tough, the kind of tough defending champs are, the kind of tough that allows you to own the most important seven minutes of the season. The run would reach 17-6 before the Gaels knew what hit them. And when it finally did, they were almost certainly on their way to the NIT. Tough consolation prize.
Tougher opponent.
“I’m the luckiest coach in college basketball,” Masiello said.
The pity, of course, is there are a dozen locales much closer to home where this winner-take-all would have generated the kind of buzz and the kind of heat such a meeting deserves. Draddy Gym and the Mulcahy Center, sure, but also the Westchester Community Center. A neutral site (Rose Hill Gym, Carnesecca Arena, Levien Gym at Columbia).
Heck, even a half-filled Garden would’ve been preferable.
Still, the Gaels and the Jaspers went after each other furiously, and the fans tried their mightiest to turn the Times Union Center into satellite campuses of Riverdale and New Rochelle. St. John’s has long been the standard-bearer for Gotham’s college basketball. The Johnnies play the big-time schedule in the big-ticket league. They call the Garden home, at least half the time.
But in many ways, if you want to discover the heart of New York college basketball, want to study its soul, you come to the MAAC. Jeff Van Gundy made pilgrimages to many MAAC gyms during the NBA lockout of 1998-99 and once marveled, “I swear a year is coming where every team in the league is going to finish 9-9.”
Tough wins in a tough league. Manhattan is that. Two years running, they took out Iona, their neighbor, their rival, their chief measuring stick. A game to be won, nets to be cut, an NCAA Tournament to participate in. And they said: Why not? Why not us?