The Year After

From Shelton’s column this morning down here:

It has been a chore to watch the Rays this year. They show flashbacks of their old selves in this game or that, sometimes even in this series or that, and then they backslide again. We are 29 games into the season, and so far the Rays have not managed as much as a three-game winning streak. This time last year, they already had a six-game streak, and they were on the verge of putting together another.

And this from Topkin’s notebook:

The Rays are 13-16 and 6½ games out of first, and Sternberg said, “If the expectations weren’t so high people would think we were playing really well.”

27-8

So the Year After ended on the opposite coast 2,711 miles from the village at not quite 2 in the morning in the East.

Maybe it wasn’t how some folks thought it would end, or where, in terms of geography, tournament or television network, but it’s got to end sometime, and tonight the right team won. St. Mary’s is a team with an NBA guard and two bigs who are pros and those kids did what they had to do in front of a home crowd that made a difference. They made the shots they needed to make and got the stops they needed to get.

This is a simple analysis, too simple, but the story tonight in a way was the story of the season: Stephen … and then what? Will had some terrific moments in the first half, with threes, with drives, with some good, needed work on the glass, but it didn’t last. This year’s team wasn’t a one-man team all the time -- talk about too simple -- but that was too true too much of the time. There’s ample opportunity to ruminate on the anatomy of that dynamic but now is not the time.

Now is also not the time to begin a discussion of some of the questions expected to come up in the offseason -- one in particular of course -- to the extent that an offseason is a thing that really even exists at this point for this program. For now, though, consider: Only four teams in 101 years of Davidson basketball have won 27 or more games in a season -- the 1968-69 team, and the last three.

The Class of 2008 graduated as the winningest class in the history of Davidson basketball.

Come May the Class of 2009 will do the same.