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Jim Boeheim couldn’t have picked a better day to start filing his retirement papers. He may have been getting his heart broken on a last-second shot by a Wake Forest player named Davis Williamson, a 3-pointer with half a second left that gave the Demon Deacons a 77-74 win over Boeheim’s Syracuse Orange.
The game may have been played at Greensboro Coliseum in North Carolina on the second day of the ACC Tournament. But the impact was surely felt 541 miles away, inside another basketball arena on Day 1 of the Big East Tournament at Madison Square Garden. Boeheim was an essential part of the Big East’s DNA for decades. He was a founding father.
And while Syracuse hasn’t played a Big East Conference game in almost 10 years — the Orange lost 78-61 to fellow soon-to-be-expat Louisville on March 16, 2013 — it still feels strange to look at a bracket for this tournament and not see Syracuse on one of the lines.
“They’re still a ghost here,” one Big East official joked Wednesday.
So while St. John’s made quick work of Butler in the tournament’s leadoff game before a polite 3 o’clock crowd, 76-61, earning an extra day of season against top-seeded Marquette on Thursday at noon, much of the chatter in and around the Garden was about Boeheim.
At first it involved a cryptic give-and-take in the postgame press conference between Boeheim and Donna Ditota, a reporter for Syracuse.com who has covered Boeheim for more than 30 years.
“I gave my retirement speech on the court last Saturday and I gave it to the press conference afterwards,” Boeheim said.
