PHILADELPHIA — Here’s the thing about pressure. You can feel it, or you can inflict it. In the week leading up to Saint Peter’s latest chance at the impossible, Shaheen Holloway insisted that his squad wouldn’t be the ones feeling it. Pressure is playing out your senior year of high school without a Division I scholarship offer. Pressure is entering the transfer portal in search of greener pastures and then asking back on the squad with your hat in your hand. Pressure is the day-to-day grind in a place like Jersey City.
At a school like Saint Peter’s, you build your roster out of young men who know pressure. A basketball game? Nah, that ain’t it.
They had one option, then. In a regional semifinal where they had no business belonging, against an over-sized team with NBA pedigree and a name-brand head coach, the only thing the Peacocks could do was take all of the stress and angst and self-awareness that was supposed to cripple them on this large a stage and they could turn it around and make the other guys feel it. They could crash the boards and win the spots and pick up their men at three-quarter court. They could play to the crowd and find their anchors within it, flashing hand signs to friends and flexing to classmates. They could flip the magnitude on its head and wield the one weapon in their sole possession: the ability to afflict the comfortable.
For 40 minutes, that is what they did. And when it was over and they could finally breathe, the only thing left for Saint Peter’s to do was sit back and let the rest of the world catch up to a realization that it had long ago made. The tiny commuter school from the grit of North Jersey may have become the first No. 15 seed to ever advance to the doorstep of the Final Four with a 67-64 win over national power Purdue on Friday night. But this was no upset. The game belonged to the Peacocks. The Boilermakers got beat.
“We know we’re just as good as any team in the country,” said guard Matthew Lee, a former walk-on who hit a huge pull-up 3-pointer midway through the first half and sank a pair of free throws with 41 seconds remaining to help position the Peacocks for the win. “As long as we stick to our game, play defense, and give it 100 percent, we feel like we can hang with anybody.”
These are the kinds of things that all of the underdogs say, but it might be time for the rest of us to stop asking the Peacocks to say them. The team that we saw on the court at the Wells Fargo Center on Friday night is the kind of team that can make life miserable for any collection of talent on the collegiate stage. As Holloway and his team reviewed film ahead of their Sweet 16 matchup with the third-seeded Boilermakers, they saw an opponent that seemed to have all of the boxes checked in their favor. Size? Purdue had it in spades, across the board, from 7-foot-4 center Zach Idey towering 8 inches against the man tasked with guarding him to 6-foot-4 guard Jaden Ivey standing (at least) 4 inches above the (listed) 6-footer Lee. Talent? Ivey is about as talented as it gets, a Top 10 prospect in this year’s draft. Pedigree? Saint Peters entered this tournament as the epitome of a 15-seed. Purdue entered it as a fixture in the Top 25.
Yet throughout the night, these sorts of contrasts seemed to consistently work in the little guy’s favor. Ivey was a non-factor: timid, off-balanced, stuffed into a shell by the ball pressure exerted by a rotating cast of defenders who stuck themselves to his grille. Holloway knew that Purdue would attempt to exploit the huge size advantage it enjoyed down low, and he knew that a certain amount of success was unavoidable. What the Peacocks needed to do was make sure it didn’t come easy.
“That’s who we are,” said Holloway, a former Seton Hall scrapper who knows a thing or two about the competitive advantages of want-to. “I played 10 guys, wasn’t very happy with the way the second group was playing so I kind of took them out, but we played 10 guys and we’ve been wearing teams down the whole year.”
On Friday night, they did it again. You could see it on the faces of the opponent throughout: frustration mixed with discomfort mixed with disbelief. After it was over, after Ivey’s pull-up 3-pointer at the buzzer bounced off the front of the rim and the building exploded, Purdue big man Trevion Williams slumped to the court, his forehead pressed against the Wells Fargo Center hardwood. At midcourt, a couple of Peacocks did the same, twin forwards Hassan and Fousseyni Drame side by side on their knees, an ecstatic scene exploding around them.
“Growing up playing basketball as a kid, you dream of moments like this,” said Darryl Banks, whose back-to-back shots with under three minutes left epitomized Saint Peter’s incessant counterpunch. “It’s just a very wonderful feeling to have everybody supporting us and just being there for us. It helps us with this run, and it’s just amazing.”
Fifteen minutes after the buzzer sounded and history was made, Banks and Holloway and Lee and mustached sharp-shooter Doug Edert emerged from the locker room and strode side by side through the bowels of the arena. As they rounded a corner, they heard a round of applause swell from a wall near a security entrance. Looking up, they saw a gaggle of brown-and-gold clad students, Purdue’s pep band, instruments at their sides, putting their hands together in appreciation for a story that they’ll now join the rest of us in watching.
