SALT LAKE CITY — Arinze Onuaku sat motionless inside his locker, using a sideline towel to cover his face and act as a barrier between him and the gut-wrenching panorama outside.
    
A few loud sobs were his only proof of consciousness, aside from his occasional glances behind that towel to see if the press had gone home yet.

One of his few interactions with teammates came when Rick Jackson sat down in the next locker over, peering through the steel mesh like a parishioner at confession, offering any signs of hope he could to his battered teammate.

Onuaku didn’t feel much like talking Thursday, and understandably so. Syracuse had just had its heart ripped out by Butler. The dream season was over. It was time to hide for a little.

There was no opportunity to consider the fact that this thing may have actually been a success.

‘Losing never feels good at this point in the season,’ senior guard Andy Rautins said. ‘For a team that had such high aspirations, I don’t think we’re going to be able to see the good side for a while.’

But this isn’t about Onuaku’s refusal to share his feelings. In moments like that one — moments where your heart stalls like an old generator, where your eyes see only the hazy shade your tears leave behind, where your jaw quivers like a tuning fork as you fight back the overwhelming emotion — there’s little motivation to face the world.

For Onuaku and the boys, though, this is more about finding that reason to peel that towel off their heads and come back out. To set aside that lingering sting and realize that this was a successful season — the one no one thought SU could have.  

‘The expectations for the team weren’t very high,’ junior forward Wes Johnson said. ‘The games that we won and winning the Big East outright, we’ve got a lot to be happy about.’

Heading into this year, Syracuse was college basketball’s year-old blockbuster, a team that captivated the nation the season prior but had since been forgotten. At the season’s opening, the names on the marquee hyped the likes of John Wall and Kentucky, Scottie Reynolds and Villanova, Sherron Collins and Kansas. The Orange was relegated to the 3-for-$5 bin.

SU wasn’t ranked in the AP Top 25 and was picked to finish sixth in the Big East conference. At best, Syracuse would be a fringe tournament team with first-round loss written all over it.

Then came Le Moyne. The Dolphins drove down Euclid Avenue and pummeled the Orange’s ego. Reruns on ‘SportsCenter’ made a team considered merely insignificant into a laughing stock.

But, like a graduation party slideshow, the good moments began to fall into place. Each triumph seemed bigger than the last one as the afterthought became the topic of conversation again.

‘Like Coach said, we were doubted from day one, from day one everyone doubted us,’ sophomore guard Scoop Jardine said. ‘We proved everyone wrong, won the Big East outright, went to the Sweet 16 without A.O. when people counted us out. Then people jumped back on our bandwagon after Kansas lost, but we didn’t look at none of that. We just took it one game at a time.’

Syracuse breezed through a 2K Sports Classic at Madison Square Garden, blowing out a North Carolina team that had, one day prior, taken care of Evan Turner and Ohio State.

It waltzed past the Big East conference schedule. In a league that, at its apex, had four teams in the Top 10 simultaneously, the Orange went 15-3.

Johnson was made into the poster boy, the cagey forward constantly on the receiving end of those crowd-pleasing alley-oops. Rautins became known as the floor general, the glue that held the team together. Jardine was the spark plug, the reserve force that propelled the Orange to so many of its second-half comebacks.

All these stories were written by the ever-expanding number of bodies on press row and witnessed by the spiking attendance. There was something special about Syracuse basketball in 2009-10, there’s no denying that.  

And as the Orange players watch the rest of the NCAA Tournament, if they can, this will be the last thing on their minds. While the talking heads jump on the Butler bandwagon, the feeling will continue to fester. Everyone will be talking about the Bulldogs playing at home, about how they embody Gene Hackman’s boys in ‘Hoosiers.’

‘That’s the most disappointing thing,’ freshman guard Brandon Triche said, ‘losing to a team that you should beat.’

But if it can, for one second, the Orange should take that towel off and look around. Think about how they did something nobody else thought they could. Then, maybe, things won’t seem so bad.   

Conor Orr is the sports editor at The Daily Orange, where his column appears occasionally. He can be reached at ctorr@syr.edu.

 

Published on March 28, 2010 at 12:00 pm