A Hail Mary’s never supposed to work. Every third-grade blacktop player knows that. You launch the ball and then pray like heck that it falls from the sky into a receiver’s hands.

But it almost never does. From Pop Warner on, coaches scream to their defenses, ‘Knock it down!’

On Saturday, the Connecticut football team must not have been listening. When Syracuse quarterback Perry Patterson heaved a pass 36 yards at the end of the first half, a mob of UConn players didn’t knock it down. They tipped it up, right into the hands of SU wide receiver Andre Fontenette, who had snuck behind a pack of Huskies in the back of the end zone to haul in the score.

Whether the ‘7 Express’ – SU’s version of the Hail Mary – was divine intervention or just plain luck, that play propelled Syracuse to victory over UConn, 42-30, in front of 34,545 fans at the Carrier Dome.

Syracuse rode the last-second touchdown to a 21-20 lead at halftime and never trailed. It outscored the Huskies 21-10 in the second half to even its record at 4-4, 2-1 in the Big East.

‘It was good luck for us,’ Patterson said. ‘That’s all it was – luck.’

Whereas before the half Syracuse looked characteristically sloppy and uninspired, it seemed to catch every break after the halftime Hail Mary. Anthony Smith intercepted a pass for a touchdown on UConn’s first possession of the second half. The ball almost fell for an incompletion, but Tony Jenkins popped it up into the air, right into Smith’s hands.

Syracuse also recovered a key fumble early in the fourth quarter. Then, on UConn’s next drive, SU recovered a botched punt deep in Connecticut’s half of the field.

Walter Reyes turned in another Carrier Dome-aided performance, rushing for 121 yards on 15 carries. He broke a 50-yard touchdown run on SU’s first play from scrimmage with a slick counter play. The drive: one play, 50 yards, nine seconds. It lifted Syracuse to a 7-0 lead, but the Huskies seemed to match every Orange score.

The Huskies (5-3, 2-3) scored with four minutes left in the first half on a 20-yard touchdown pass from quarterback Dan Orlovsky, who threw for 445 yards and three touchdowns. But kicker Matt Nuzie had missed an extra point for UConn earlier in the game, only giving the Huskies a six-point lead, and setting up Fontenette’s touchdown catch and a dominant second half for the Orange.

‘Going into halftime like that, for us to get that touchdown, is big,’ said SU wide receiver Steve Gregory. ‘It gives you something that lifts you up and gets you ready to come out fired up.’

UConn head coach Randy Edsall called the Hail Mary a matter of a missed assignment. Patterson called it luck. Fontenette called it being in the right place at the right time.

‘When the ball was in the air I thought it was going to be overthrown,’ Fontenette said. ‘So I took a little step back.’

Then he smiled.

‘But things happen.’

Fontenette said the Orange worked on tip drills during the spring and summer with the wide receivers tipping the ball back to each other.

Center Matt Tarullo never could have expected the ball to land in the hands of one of his teammates. He expected the ball would be intercepted. He said he was already in defensive mode, running down the field to make a tackle on the UConn defensive back who came down with the ball. Instead of making the tackle, he ran up and joined in the celebration while a mess of Connecticut players stood in a pack in the end zone shaking their heads.

It capped a wild slugfest in which the teams combined for 972 yards of offense and five turnovers, though none of them were by SU.

‘Things went the right way today,’ Tarullo said. ‘And they’re going to go right for the next couple weeks.’

Published on October 31, 2004 at 12:00 pm