March 23, 2009

I can't believe the news today

Oh, I can't close my eyes and make it go away

There's a moment of confusion, of subconscious limbo, when one wakes up in the morning and tries to focus on the alarm clock.

Am I awake? Am I dreaming?

But what if waking up only makes the nightmare worse?

A year ago, on a Monday morning, I woke up to the news I already knew but didn't want to believe. But I'd seen it myself twelve hours earlier.

Today, March 23, 2009, is the one year anniversary of Georgetown's 74-70 loss on Easter Sunday to Davidson in the 2008 NCAA Tournament.

This is NOT about Stephen Curry.

How could it NOT be, you say? March Madness exists as drama, the closest sports comes to theater, precisely because it constantly re-tells the archetypal story of the plucky underdog.

"Talk about David and Goliath," screamed Jim Nantz as the buzzer sounded on the improbable upset in Raleigh, "I submit to you: Davidson College to the Sweet Sixteen!"

Davidson, and by extension the 2008 NCAA Tournament, was personified in its David.

The man who dashed Georgetown's dreams stands a skinny 6 foot 3 inches tall. He sucks on his mouthpiece like a child with a pacifier. At one point on Easter Sunday 2008, he was 2 for 12 from the field, his team trailing by 16 points.

And then Stephen Curry beat Georgetown with a single shot.

The record will show Curry converted 6 of his final 9 field goals, added five free throws, and led a crucial 16-2 run sparking a furious comeback and producing a shocking 74-70 victory. But Stephen Curry actually defeated Georgetown with a four-point play. With 14:24 remaining in the game. After which Davidson trailed by 11 points. And after which Curry missed his next four shots.

Stephen Curry played the role of David perfectly. But Georgetown wasn't the first Goliath.

Two days earlier, Curry scored 30 of his 40 points in the second half as Davidson rallied from a double-digit second half deficit to defeat Gonzaga. The key turning point in the game came with 14:46 to go, when Curry's three-point play cut into Gonzaga's largest lead of the game and sparked a 17-6 run that tied the game and turned the tide in Davidson's favor.

I hadn't read that script too closely as I sat in the first row of the upper deck at the RBC Center, in a corner section adjacent to the Davidson bench. But I'd typecast the lead actor. In nine seasons as a Georgetown fan, I cannot remember any moment as vividly as when with 14:24 to go and Georgetown leading 48-33, Curry released a three-point shot, the basket on a direct line from his hands to my seat. I knew it was good the moment he released it, and as the shrill referee's whistle punctuated the ball dropping through the net, I knew how the movie was going to end.

If you saved a DVD …if you watched highlight clips from the game…if you paused to ponder what on earth happened…if you woke up suddenly from a bad dream in the middle of the night…you saw Stephen Curry. The ending is always the same.

And yet for the fans of Goliath, it's not the movie, its hero, or its soundtrack that 365 days later.

Georgetown lost a basketball game last Easter Sunday, and we were all left with the most fickle, nagging, puzzling emotion possible to sporting fans.

It's not frustration…

…though that seemed the dominant emotion for weeks after the abrupt end to the Hoyas season. Frustration screamed each time Stephen Curry drains a contested three, or converted a backdoor layup. It wondered what if the Hoyas hadn't drowned under the pressure in a stream of uncharacteristic turnovers. It lamented Georgetown's game-changing big man Roy Hibbert only being able to compete for 16 minutes, cursed the names Tom O'Neill, Paul Jannsen, and Doug Sirmons who like few players that season were able to take Hibbert out of a game.

It's not loneliness…

…although the most chilling of feelings in fandom came twice in the span of an hour in Raleigh. It arrived with overwhelming force on the trail of Curry's four-point play-an explosion unlike any I've heard in a college arenas from McDonough Gym to the Carrier Dome. 19,477 "neutral" fans in the RBC Center rose and cheered as one for David. I never turned around to see it.

I did turn around in the parking lot. I'd stayed just long enough to watch Davidson finish their celebration and leave the court-I guess even in the face of a numbing defeat, I recognized that I'd witnessed something special that day. There's no walk lonelier than away from the end of your season, and I don't remember anything until I reached my car. In many disaster movies, there is a final shot of the survivors turning around and gazing incredulously upon the situation they've escaped-be it a plane crash, a towering inferno, or in my case, a Second Round NCAA Tournament game. And as I stared blankly, stunned, at the RBC Center for the final time, I realized that I was literally completely alone-there wasn't another person in sight in the entire full parking lot-and it was completely silent except for the faint sound of birds in the distance.

The two sounds I remember most from Easter Sunday: the crowd roaring and the birds chirping.

You have a lot to think about in four hours, and the questions swirled in my head as I headed north on I-85.

"What if?" I thought as Maryland and Virginia license plates sped past me, familiar faces looking forlorn through the windows.

"Why us?" I wondered as my IPod shuffled to the most hauntingly appropriate song imaginable-U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday."

"What now?" I pondered as I drove away from the 2008 season and into uncertainty.

Uncertainty.

The legacy of Easter Sunday 2008 is the uncertainty that has stayed with Georgetown basketball ever since.

The Davidson game wasn't merely the end of a season-it was the end of an era of Hoya basketball. March 23, 2008 was the last college game for Roy Hibbert, Jonathan Wallace, Patrick Ewing, Jr., and Tyler Crawford-a senior class that along with Jeff Green had made Georgetown a Goliath of college basketball again. It was the last game in a Georgetown uniform for Vernon Macklin and Jeremiah Rivers-key role-players and two further links to the Hoyas' 2007 Final Four appearance who would transfer in the coming weeks.

Little David's slingshot shattered the certainty of Georgetown basketball.

There was a sense of predictability in this senior class-John Thompson III referred to Jonathan Wallace as his "security blanket". Countless times before in a crucial moment, there was Wallace with a silky touch from the free throw line, Hibbert with a rabbit-from-his-hat three pointer, Green with a tricky bank shot, Ewing with a perfectly timed block.

We'd read the script before as Hoya fans. And then the story abruptly changed.

Sure, some of our favorite characters remained. There was Jessie Sapp, the shooting guard with swagger to spare who daggered West Virginia. There was DaJuan Summers, who sank the Big East-winning three-pointer against Louisville as smoothly as a practice line layup. We even liked the new cast-this Greg Monroe fellow seemed typecast as a Jeff Green.

But as we now know, the chemistry was never quite there. Neither were the results.

How to explain a 16-15 season? How to reconcile the dizzying highs-an overtime win over Memphis, a Big East opening blowout in Hartford, a crushing home victory over Syracuse-with the puzzling lows-two losses to St. John's and Cincinnati, a 2-9 swoon in January and February, and first round exits in the BET and NIT?

You didn't always get a show in the previous era of Georgetown basketball, but if you saw the Hoyas at home from January 8, 2007 until the end of 2009, you could be certain of a victory.

The Hoyas of Wallace, Hibbert, Green, Ewing, and Crawford weren't flashy, but they were consistent. This is why the Davidson loss was so shocking-that Georgetown team didn't lose those games. Even in the direst of circumstances-say, trailing by a point in the closing seconds of a regional semifinal-Hoya fans needn't be nervous, because they could be certain their team would calmly diffuse the situation.

The beauty of Jeff Green's game-winner against Vanderbilt in 2007 is that he executed a set play flawlessly-the very same that JTIII's alma mater Princeton used to defeat UCLA in 1996-but still needed to improvise at the last moment. In a single flourish, that was Georgetown basketball: execution meets innovation.

Perhaps no play crystallized the woes of the 2008-2009 Hoyas than the final moments of a home overtime loss to Cincinnati. When Chris Wright and Greg Monroe failed to connect on a smartly designed set play, there was no Jeff Green to save the day. Instead, it fell to Austin Freeman to hoist a contested three pointer that never had a chance.

You were just never certain what to expect with these Hoyas.

And one year and one disappointing season later, we're still asking the question, no less certain of the answer than on a Sunday afternoon in Raleigh:

What now?

The one man who can slay Stephen Curry shares a place with him in Georgetown history:

Jeff Green.

You see, today is also the two year anniversary of Georgetown's 66-65 victory over Vanderbilt in the 2007 Sweet Sixteen.

I celebrated that night two years ago with a delirious group of Hoya alums at a game watch in north Arlington. Moments after the final buzzer, I received a call from another game watch in Charlottesville. My longtime friend, former roommate, and student section mate Jon Shoup-Mendizabal and I instantly hit on the obvious comparison over the phone-this generation of Hoya fans just had their Nat Burton moment.

Nat Burton converted a buzzer-beater that lifted Georgetown to a first-round NCAA victory over Arkansas during my freshman year of 2001-a game I watched in Jon's dorm room. The funny thing, of course, is that Burton wasn't supposed to take the shot-he held on to the ball for the final play rather than pass it off to the Hoyas' point guard Kevin Braswell.

That 2001 team, like the 2008 version, also lost six players in the offseason. The following season, the 2002 Hoyas, just like this year's squad, struggled with inconsistency and a frustrating inability to win close games. I felt many times as if 2009 was the Curse of Kevin Braswell rather than the Curse of Stephen Curry.

So what does Jeff Green have to do with all of this?

Well, for starters-we don't need Greg Monroe to become Jeff Green. Once in a generation players come along…well, you get the point. Though they both seem tailor made for the point-forward position in Georgetown's offense, Greg should…and will…blaze his own trail in a Hoya uniform.

What mattered about Jeff Green wasn't his skill set. What mattered was the certainty Jeff Green brought to the basketball court…an intangible quality that one isn't born with, can't be taught, and won't be forced.

It can only be gained through experience.

The smartest thing anyone said of the 2009 Georgetown basketball team was that they had problems that were fixable, but not within the space of the current season.

There doesn't need to be a "Jeff Green" for Georgetown to succeed going forward; rather the entire team collectively needs to gain the experience and confidence that Jeff Green possessed. It will happen in due time, just as it did for Jeff.

On the night Maryland eliminated Georgetown in the 2001 Sweet Sixteen, I said to Jon something along the lines of-it's going to be a fun ride, I can't wait to see what we'll do in the next three seasons.

Little did I know then what losing six players can do to your sense of certainty.

Flash forward to the morning of Georgetown's 2007 Elite Eight game against North Carolina. In the grocery store, I bump into Steve Fraser, alum of the Class of 2006, whose senior year marked Georgetown's return to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2001. Steve's season tickets are next to mine at the Verizon Center, and we'd experienced the entire delirious ride together that year. Steve had one thing on his mind that morning-how in the world was Georgetown going to handle the #1 seeded North Carolina Tar Heels?

"You know what man," I said without thinking, "Today is a new day. Anything can happen and I can't wait to see what we'll do."

Uncertainty is a fickle emotion. Exhilarating at one turn, heartbreaking at the next. It's a long journey from Jeff Green's bank shot to Stephen Curry's four-point play…a long distance from East Rutherford to Raleigh…a long fall from the Final Four to the NIT.

But the good news is-we're on the right side of the curve. The 2009 Hoyas look like those of JTIII's first years on the Hilltop, a talented but green bunch gaining valuable experience even as the tough losses pile up. Jeff Green isn't walking through that door, but six players aren't walking out that door either.

Maybe the road from uncertainty to certainty is shorter than we think.

John Hawkes (SFS '04)

Proud Member of Generation Burton