Thursday, January 17, 2008
Virginia Tech steals a page from last year's storybook season
Aaron McFarling
Recent columns
CHARLOTTESVILLE -- They remembered. All the traits of last year's team -- the resilience, the defense, the flat-out fun of it all -- the Virginia Tech Hokies are bringing it again.
They remembered. How to light up a town still hung over from football, how to conjure up irrational dreams of big wins and March runs.
I thought they'd forgotten, really. And there really would have been no blaming them. That's just how it goes when you lose the heart of your team to graduation and usher in a half-dozen freshmen and ask them all to play big minutes. You forget things. You wipe everything clean and build again.
But these guys remembered. Late Wednesday night, when all the timeouts had (finally) been spent and all the whistles had been swallowed and all the stakes had been laid right out there before them, the Hokies delivered a buzzer-beating 70-69 victory. It happened in overtime. It happened on the road.
And it happened to be familiar to anyone who's watched the Hokies surprise people for two of the past three years.
Coach Seth Greenberg keeps saying it. One shot. One play. One stop. That's the difference between winning and losing, between wanting to devour your postgame meal or wanting to throw it up. For the second straight game, the Hokies could eat like a pack of pigs.
It was the first win for Tech in Charlottesville since 1968, but that's merely a footnote. The Hokies suddenly, wonderfully, are about the now. Any predictions at this point would be folly, except for one: This team will be interesting all year long. And I'm not sure you could say that two months ago.
Outside of North Carolina and Duke, the ACC does not intimidate. The Hokies are now 2-1 in the league, with wins over Maryland and UVa -- both of which figured to be middle- to upper-tier teams coming into the season. A blown lead at Wake Forest last month cost them a 3-0 start, but they seem to have learned from it.
Behind the shooting of rookies, the Hokies rallied from down five against the Terrapins in the final 1:46 on Sunday. And on Wednesday, they jumped out to a 9-0 lead, gave it back, and then spent most of the rest of the night staving off their rival's best runs.
A moment here to discuss Sean Singletary, the UVa senior point guard. In a word, he was brilliant -- canning 3-pointers off the dribble, slashing through the lane, setting up teammates with fast-break drop passes. He even fooled the referees on one drive, a crossover so devastating that the officials figured he must have palmed the ball with his left hand.
He finished with a season-high 34 points, 10 rebounds, three assists and three steals. He did all he could. But once again, he didn't get enough help. While Singletary made 12 of 21 shots, the rest of the Cavaliers made just 12 of 42 -- and they still managed to put the Hokies on the ropes on several occasions.
"We were down 9. We were down 5," Greenberg said. "They're so young they don't know any better."
Deron Washington does. The senior forward was the one who had the courage to take that last shot, even after he'd already missed two jumpers in the final minute that would have given Tech the lead.
Taking an inbounds pass with 4 seconds left, Washington drove the ball down the left side of the lane and tossed up a scoop shot. The ball disappeared among the defenders for a second, then skipped up off the glass. As it dropped through the net, the neon lights that frame the backboard lit up, indicating the end.
John Paul Jones Arena had a familiar sound at the moment. It was the one we heard last year in Durham and Chapel Hill and Miami and Atlanta, the one that comes when the home team loses to a football school.
Remember that sound?
These Hokies do.
