Men’s Basketball Wins a Game!
Really, that happened. Men’s hoops actually won a CAA game. And even more incredibly, they didn’t just win the game, but they did it in grand style by turning the tables on a top-half team and coming back from down 10 in the last two minutes to tie the game and then cruising in OT. As you probably know, they’d become almost comically expert at being on the other end of this, racing out to leads and then finding ever-more-ridiculous ways to blow games.
Not sure if the personal interjections make this better or worse, but it’s also confession time. I quit on this game with about three minutes to go feeling like Charlie Brown with the football being pulled away again for even having invested time and hope when they had run out to a solid first-half lead and then given it away again. After watching a 40-28 Dukes lead turn into a 49-48 deficit midway through the second, one of The Breeze’s outstanding writer’s this year, Kevin Romm (@Kevin_Romm) tweeted something about “this could come down to the last shot” and we snakily said something about that boding well. Once the Dukes had fallen into the hole in the last five minutes, I shut it down and started thinking about how I’d write about the meaning of the word “bode” and, in an homage to the original Wizznutzz blog that was one of our earliest inspirations, go off on a tangent about despondent Russian poetry and how that relates to following a truly horrible team. [Side note: Hey Wizards fans, if you aren’t old enough to have suffered through the Gar Heard/Calbert Cheney/God Shamgod years, then you don’t get to complain about this year’s team being inconsistent].
Alas, the joke’s on me, and I was thrilled to go back and watch highlights a couple hours later. Short version is this. Stuckey Mosely buried a deep three in the last ten seconds of regulation to force OT. Probably the biggest shot of the year for JMU because they would hit the gas in OT, where they never trailed and pulled away. And the surprise star of the night was freshman Darius Banks, who absolutely went off with 20 points and 15 huge rebounds, both career highs by considerable margins. Mosely did his thing as usual, leading all scorers with 24, but the Dukes had real balance last night with not only Banks, but solid contributions across the stat sheet from Ramone Snowden, Matt Lewis, and Develle Phillips.
And not to get all carried away, but a – dare we say it? – winning streak could be on the horizon with the CAA’s other cellar-dweller Drexel visiting the Convo Saturday at 4 p.m.
