And now it's all over

The first exposure to college basketball that I can remember was the 1984 Big East Tournament.

I was 11, and I hadn't ever seen anything like it. Cable TV was still fairly new back then, but we didn't live in a place that had it, anyway, but a local independent television station that's now a Fox affiliate carried the games. (At least I assume that's who it was. I can't imagine any of the other three stations we got showing it, and in later years the station would also show Celtics and Yankees games, which I watched religiously, even thought I hated the Celtics at the time.)

It was the year Syracuse's Pearl Washington put on a show before the Orangemen lost to Georgetown in the finals. I was enthralled, and it actually set the stage for a lot of my college basketball fan days since then: loving Syracuse, hating Georgetown and Syracuse mostly finding a way to blow it at the end, including tonight's epic collapse against Louisville.

In the years since, teams have come and gone, and some like TCU came and left before they ever arrived. But every March, Syracuse, Georgetown, Connecticut, St. John's, Villanova, Providence, Seton Hall, Pittsburgh and whoever else was in the league would gather at Madison Square Garden for the conference tournament.

It was my favorite team, in the best arena and the best tournament. How many tournaments have provided moments like Gerry McNamara's run, Kemba Walker's five games in five days or a six-overtime epic? And that's just Syracuse and UConn, and that's just since 2006? (By the way, I watched the entire six-overtime game. After two overtimes, I thought about going to bed; after four overtimes, I thought, "Screw it. I've put this much time into it, I might as well stay until the end.")

Of course, we've all known that it was all about to change in a big way. With Syracuse and Pitt leaving, how could it not? And then the Catholic 7 leaving ripped off any Band-Aid of thought that the conference might still look a little like the Big East we've grown to know and love. It was going to be, as Sean McDonough put it numerous times tonight, "the end of the Big East as we know it."

(For one, Mrs. Last Honest, a Connecticut fan who still doesn't know what the Huskies did to be the one kid without a chair when the music stopped and thinks the program is in serious trouble unless the ACC finally decides to take them in, has already said she refuses to call the Catholic 7 plus however many members they add the Big East.)

And then I read this week's Sports Illustrated story about the end of the Big East to see this:

“Syracuse’s departure would result in nothing less than a mutation in the conference’s DNA, the equivalent of North Carolina or Duke joining the Big Ten or SEC.” 

And this:

“That's why Syracuse's departure essentially finished the league. 'OK, BC left,' (Bill) Raftery says. 'Virginia Tech, Miami -- we can live without 'em. But 'Cuse leaving, that's the one that pierced everybody. Syracuse won the Oscar every year for interest, for reputation, and they always had a chance to win it all.'” 

My attitude about Syracuse -- seen through Orange-colored glasses, no doubt -- has always been that going to the ACC was what they had to do and what anyone else would have done, that in a world where football and the TV money that comes with it makes all the decisions, they had to get in the best place for themselves and that the ACC was that place. The thought of conference games with Duke and North Carolina didn't hurt, either.

But still, it's hard when your wife talks about Syracuse in slightly bitter tones, especially considering that an athletic director at Boston College who did wonders to wreck his own program before retiring apparently kept UConn out of the ACC all by his lonesome. I don't blame her for it, but it's still hard.

And now, even though the Big East was likely always going to meet a bad end because it made all the wrong moves regarding football and money -- I've long thought that they should have seized their own bowl when the BCS first started, instead of being a floater that could easily be cut off -- it's also kind of hard to read that  their leaving might have been the beginning of the end for the league.

So it was a little sad watching tonight's game (even though as I write this it's now early the next morning), even before but especially after Syracuse tossed up its massive fail of a second half. What I first discovered as an 11-year-old has ended.

Sure, I probably won't think about it when Syracuse plays at Cameron Indoor Stadium, North Carolina comes to the Carrier Dome or they hopefully kick the crap out of BC, but it'll probably hit home sometime next March, when instead of settling in to see the Orange at MSG, they'll be playing in Greensboro in front of crowds that will always see them as the outsider.