As the minutes melted away, as the lead began to grow, that’s when you got one final clue just how completely St. John’s has captured the imagination of the big, bad city. As the seconds slipped away to zero, as the cushion grew more comfortable until the 82-66 final, you saw — and heard — what happens when team and town twin.
“We’ve said it all year,” Rick Pitino would say after the final buzzer, after the red, white and blue confetti was released like a colorful hailstorm inside Madison Square Garden, and before his team would make the pilgrimage up the blue Werner ladders to cut down the nets. “We are New York City’s team.”
And New York is St. John’s city. We always talked about history, about all those NIT titles, about the great 1980s teams that once moved the great Looie Carnesecca to proclaim: “Today these fellas walked with kings.” But for so long, all of that seemed dipped in a permanent black-and-white hue.
That was about yesterday. That was about the archives.
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