Jan. 13, 2010
A POSTCARD FROM THE NOT-TOO-DISTANT PAST
This week, I'm on assignment for the Hoop Club Blog, writing to you from March 2006.
Well, in a manner of speaking anyway…sadly Hoyas Unlimited was unwilling to loan me the Athletic Department's DeLorean for a few days.
The location on the space-time continuum from which I'm writing this humble blog post is actually Dayton, Ohio, where I'm holed up on a three-day business trip near one of the landmarks of recent Georgetown basketball history.
My travels of course pale in comparison to the important business trip the Georgetown Hoyas embarked upon in Western Ohio over the long weekend of March 17-19, 2006. Dayton as you well know was the site of the Hoyas' 1st and 2nd Round games in the Midwest Regional of the 2006 NCAA Tournament, the first NCAA appearance for the Blue and Gray in five seasons (and the first time in almost a decade that they'd appeared in the postseason from the Eastern Time Zone).
The Hoyas took care of business at the University of Dayton Arena, advancing past a stubbornly determined Northern Iowa squad in a tense 54-49 first round game before advancing to the Sweet Sixteen two days later with a convincing 70-52 victory over #2 seed Ohio State in what amounted to a road postseason game only 75 miles from Columbus (this was no small feat…take it from someone who has taken in my surroundings at a few local restaurants this week and been in-state when the Buckeyes upset a top-ten conference foe: The Ohio State University is kind of a big deal here.)
Hoya fans excited over their team's triumphant return to NCAA Tournament play after a half-decade absence poured into The Buckeye State from across the country that weekend. Notable in the Blue and Gray caravan were a bus full of students from Hoya Blue who made the 7.5 hour (according to most reputable map services) trek from Washington, DC. This trek allegedly took upwards of 10 hours due to a series of logistical, directional, and meteorologically-related mishaps (I am in no position to judge-I got my group's car hopelessly lost yesterday morning in downtown Dayton even though the east-west streets near our hotel are sequentially numbered).
You were certainly glad those students made it to Dayton if you watched the game on CBS-in a 13,500 seat venue that was almost certainly filled with Ohio State fans, you can clearly hear the Hoya Blue section chanting "Sweet Sixteen!" in the final minutes of the game.
I wasn't chanting "Sweet Sixteen!" at the UD Arena that day. Nope, I witnessed Georgetown basketball history from my living room in Florida. Instead I was "stranded" in the Sunshine State (Dayton's nickname would suggest otherwise, but it ain't easy to secure a flight to the "Birthplace of Aviation" on short notice) on a break from graduate school…
…which I was attending in the hopes of securing a better paying job…
…like the one that sent me to Dayton this week.
Circle of life. Still wish I'd have seen Roy Hibbert's sweet spin move in person.
Even though my hotel is only 2 miles from the University of Dayton's campus, I won't see the Arena on this trip (too bad- that parking lot is an ideal location to ramp your DeLorean up to 88 M.P.H). What I have seen in three short days is a glimpse of why Dayton is one of the most popular destinations for the NCAA Tournament in recent years.*
(*You probably know that Dayton has hosted the NCAA play-in game since 2001. What you may not know is that the UD Arena has hosted the most NCAA Tournament games (82) of any active venue. In case you're making your Hoya postseason travel plans early, the Tourney next stops in Dayton in 2013.)
The city of Dayton falls perfectly into the modest-sized city demographic that is "just-right" for no-hassle travel and ample entertainment (it's in the same 150-250K population range that also includes NCAA stalwarts Boise, ID and Winston-Salem, NC) on a maximum three-day stay. The residents are friendly and eager to promote their town to outsiders, who they immediately recognize (was it because I was wearing these things?). Most importantly, there is a noticeable sports culture in the city despite the absence of a major professional franchise, which means the whole town eagerly embraces the opportunity to be the center stage for an important collegiate event. I drove around town today thinking-I'd love to watch basketball here.
In short, it was the perfect place (and time) for a galvanizing moment in Georgetown basketball.
I've heard more than a few Georgetown fans compare the current men's basketball team to the 2005-2006 squad that rolled through Dayton to the Sweet Sixteen. There are in fact several readily available similarities between the two squads:
--Both followed young Hoya teams that reached the NIT.
--Both featured a multi-talented sophomore point forward-Jeff Green and Greg Monroe.
--Both had dynamic upperclassman tandems from the same geographic region destined to be linked forever in the minds of Hoya fans-the Westchester H.S. duo Ashanti Cook and Brandon Bowman from Southern California and suburban D.C. natives Chris Wright and Austin Freeman.
I suspect however that two explanations hold the key to why the 2006 vs. 2010 comparison is so attractive to hopeful Hoya fans:
--The 2006 team, like the current incarnation of Hoyas, typically used a tight seven man rotation and got a fair amount of scoring from the starting lineup. Against Ohio State in 2006, the Hoyas put up an odd box score anomaly in that only four players scored their 70 points.
--We're dying for another galvanizing moment like March 19, 2006.
So long as we're taking cues from Generation Roy, I thought I'd check in on what the 2006 Hoyas were doing at this point in the season.
As it turns out, on January 14th, 2006-four years to the day before Georgetown takes on Seton Hall at the Verizon Center this Thursday-the Hoyas lost a 74-67 decision to #4 Connecticut at the Hartford Civic Center.
Nothing special there, right?
Well now, wait a minute. Unlike the Dayton adventure, I was actually in attendance at the Hartford Civic Center that Saturday afternoon with a bus full of Hoya Blue students.
It's hard to keep the years straight sometimes-if we're going by "We Are Georgetown" shirt slogans, this is "Respect Is Back/Fear Is Next"-but the 2005-06 season marked a full changeover in the Hoya Blue leadership and in many ways a complete re-start of the organization. The large and full-voiced bloc of students you can hear on CBS in Dayton was built from a foundation laid at the beginning of the season. You wouldn't remember (unless you listen to nodak89's single "HOYA Basketball") but Georgetown brought half a dozen buses of students to Annapolis for the season opener against Navy, and couple dozen to a pre-Thanksgiving road game at James Madison.
It was that Connecticut game though I always felt set the tone for what Hoya Blue could accomplish when it came to supporting the Hoyas away from home. The success of the Dayton experience probably doesn't happen without the trial run of sending a bus of students to Connecticut for the weekend during Big East season.
That game in Hartford, forgettable though it may be in retrospect, was a galvanizing moment for Hoya Blue as an organization in 2005-06 the same way the Second Round victory over Ohio State was for the collective Georgetown fan base that came back in force thanks to that tournament run.
So getting back into our DeLorean here…what does this mean for the 2009-10 Hoyas?
Of course it's too early to know whether any comparisons with the 2005-2006 squad will prove true-something about "The Waiting".
But this writer has to wonder: did we just have a galvanizing moment last Saturday?
The post-game hyperbole is largely accurate in my view: the Hoyas' 15-point second half comeback against Connecticut at the Verizon Center ought to rank up there with the greatest comebacks in the program's modern history.
But the context is as important as the result:
For one thing, the attendance on Saturday was 5,000 fans more than any previous Georgetown home game this season. A lot of Hoya fans saw this game in person. And let's not forget-this is a team following up on a NIT appearance and some tough home losses last season. Collectively, Hoya fans needed a great game-like the Duke contest in 2006…or that double OT game in South Bend…or the dominating home win over Syracuse-to lift our spirits.
Great-Scott! We've got one.
Amazingly, I overheard two fellow conference attendees in the hallway yesterday discussing the ever-complicated scenarios that make up the current Big East basketball standings.
It's a mess. As I write this, Pittsburgh only minutes ago validated its status as one of only two Big East unbeatens (the other being Villanova, who I watched last night while flipping between-what else-the Ohio State game) after just four conference games. The Hoyas sit in a logjam of five teams with just a single conference loss.
There isn't a single easy game on the schedule, with every Big East foe a potential spoiler
. Just ask Syracuse and West Virginia, both taken to the very limit in early conference play by the Seton Hall Pirates, who come speeding into the Verizon Center on Thursday night like one of Bobby Gonzalez's patented fast breaks.
I'm not taking any chances this time. My flight back to Washington, DC has long been booked, and I should be back in town with hours to spare before tip-off.
They shouldn't have trouble finding a plane in Dayton, right?
John Hawkes (SFS '04)
Proud Member of Generation Burton
