Jonny Flynn wasn’t going to skirt the issue. Syracuse lost after blowing an 11-point lead with three and a half minutes to play. That doesn’t happen. That’s inconceivable. Especially not now, not when the Orange so desperately needs wins to keep this bizarre season alive.

Losses like these kill teams. No one wants to admit it, never. But it’s easy to feel it.

‘It’s going to be really hard getting over this,’ Flynn said. ‘We’re going to wake up, still think about it. See it all over ESPN. See it in the papers.

‘We had a chance. That’s all I can say. We had a chance, and we didn’t show up.’

Until Saturday, Syracuse had shown up for much of the season. Syracuse had overcome all of the injuries, all of the defections and all of the inexperience. Until Saturday, Syracuse was still in it, somehow, someway.

Until Saturday.

‘That was crazy,’ sophomore Paul Harris said. ‘I can’t believe it.’

Believe it or not, the ending was a fitting way to likely destroy Syracuse’s hopes at qualifying for the NCAA Tournament.

A season cursed by a summer knee injury to Andy Rautins conspicuously worsened after Eric Devendorf suffered an early-season injury and Josh Wright’s inexplicable Winter Break exit. Just like an 11-point blowout falling to a 2-point lead, then a 1-point deficit and ultimately, a 5-point loss.

Now it’ll take a miracle for this seven-man team to make it to March Madness.

But isn’t that what has already happened this season, a miracle? The fact that the Orange took it this far, without any outside shooting and not enough personnel to play a pressure defense when needed, is amazing.

‘They have very good players,’ Pittsburgh head coach Jamie Dixon said of the current SU team. ‘Their depth is obviously a challenge. That’s an NCAA Tournament team. The stretch that they’ve played is unbelievable. But that’s part of our conference.’

Exactly. A boatload of talent, but not enough bodies. Just like an 11-point lead with no way to close it out.

‘I thought we had the game sewn up – all we had to do was hold the ball,’ freshman forward Donte Greene said.

Yes, Syracuse was [ITALICS]that[/ITALICS] close to beating Pitt. Is the Orange an NCAA Tournament team if it beats the Panthers? Maybe.

But think about this: What has Syracuse accomplished this season? In terms of big, resume-touting wins, there’s one: Georgetown. SU lost two home games to Atlantic 10 schools that should have been wins. The early-season victories over Washington and Virginia? Not so attractive now.

And whenever Syracuse has had a chance to notch a big win during conference play, the Orange always played well enough to lose. Saturday it didn’t look like it until there was 3:30 left. But the result remains the same.

Pittsburgh would have been the second feather in the cap, and so timely. That’s what hurts the most, Greene said.

‘It’s worse,’ he said of the loss coming when it did. ‘It’s bad anytime you have a loss. Right now, it’s very bad.’

Jim Boeheim just wanted to scream. He didn’t get the chance to – maybe that’s why he wouldn’t take any questions from the media following his one minute and 35 second statement.

It was the most telling Boeheim press conference of the season. The dynamic of this team, so frustratingly talented but 17-12, tied for 10th place in the Big East, was driving the coach mad.

Boeheim wanted to praise his players for one of the finest games they’ve played all season. He did. Then he angrily talked about the turnovers, the lackadaisical defense and the misused timeouts.

It all amounts to one thing.

‘Young guys are going to make mistakes,’ he said. ‘They knew we had timeouts. We just…’

The coach trailed off before he went into the examples of his players’ miscues in the game’s final sequences that will play over and over again in Boeheim’s and his players’ heads.

That will most likely be the lasting memory of this season. Boeheim has been to the NIT in back-to-back seasons only once in his 32-year career.

And if this was Syracuse’s ‘best game we could play at every level,’ according to Boeheim, then there isn’t much to look forward to for the rest of the season.

‘It’s a tough one to swallow, but we’re going to get over it,’ Flynn said.

It may take an entire offseason for Syracuse to get over those three minutes and 30 seconds.

Matt Gelb is the sports editor at The Daily Orange, where his columns appear occasionally. He can be reached at magelb@syr.edu.

Published on March 2, 2008 at 12:00 pm