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Spokane.net »
Sudoku
 | Thursday, March 11, 2004 |
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Sports Curses? Eags would not be foiled again John Blanchette The Bambino trade has been voided, the Bartman ball blown up. The black cloud over Joe Btfsplk's head? Nothing but sunshine now. And players will now clamor to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated in advance of the big game. Curses come and generally stay, but on Wednesday night at Eastern Washington University's Reese Court, the Eagles dispensed with the mother of all local jinxes -- well, other than getting a restaurant off the ground overlooking Spoka The Eags are in. In lieu of a pinch or a jolt from the cardiac paddles, let's hear that again: They're in. It took 20 years of trying and three wrenching, sorrowful, excruciating near-misses, but Eastern is -- at last -- 1/65th of our March obsession, and never has it felt so good to share. With a 71-59 victory over Northern Arizona in Wednesday's championship game of the Big Sky Conference Basketball Tournament, the Eagles crashed through the door they've been rapping on so politely these past three years -- earning the Sky's visa into the NCAA Tournament against an ogre to be named on Sunday. "How good is it?" said senior Alvin Snow, rolling a question over in his head. "How great is it? It's superb. For me, this is life at its peak." Maybe in a week he can say differently, if the Eagles pull off one of those first-round shockers, a 15 seed bringing a 2 to its knees, or whatever. But even then there's no guarantee that the high will match doing what Eastern has never done before, in front of an adoring mob of 4,615 -- moving even grown-up graduates to leap over the courtside tables and join in the midcourt mosh. Not that the Eagles didn't milk the suspense -- or, rather, the angst. Having lost in three successive Big Sky finals beginning with 2001, Eastern played a half that suspiciously resembled Act IV of their perverse and private Greek tragedy, falling behind NAU by as many as eight points, seeing shots swatted away left and right and missing most of what made it to the rim, and playing defense as if NAU had some sort of contagious skin condition. But after halftime, the Eagles went all chameleon on everybody, turning back into the team they'd been the last two months of the season -- erasing the deficit with their first two shots and taking the lead for good fittingly enough on a 3-pointer by tournament MVP Brendon Merritt, who has never come up bigger. Now the crowd was into it and the Lumberjacks were, whether they knew it or not, out of it. And somewhere in the steamy grandstands, an EWU student took his made-for-TV sign that read "Eagles Soon Play NCAA 2urnament" and began scratching out the "Soon" with a felt-tip. Just what this means to the program, the campus and the community will be chewed on for the rest of the week and beyond. Each year, college basketball's Championship Week births these little epiphanies -- an IUPUI and a Vermont last year, this year an Eastern and maybe somebody else. The waiting list is shrinking. Of the NCAA's 326 Division I teams, only 21 have been in the business longer than Eastern without breaking into Bracketville. And then there is this -- only twice before has the state of Washington ever sent two teams to the NCAAs and there's every sense UW may not be done with the math yet. But this day was about Eastern, period. "In perception alone," said EWU coach Ray Giacoletti, "it validates Eastern Washington -- the university, the community, being Division I. What is it, 20 years? Any time you do something for the first time, it's always that much more special. Time well tell how much it means, but what these kids are about to go through in the next seven days is something they won't forget for the rest of their lives." Actually, they can say that about the entire journey, which plumbed the depths of the Eastern psyche. It wasn't just the three previous tries in the Big Sky title game, because every Eagle took that a little differently. Merritt insisted it was never talked about. Big Gregg Smith, an Eastern bit player who stretched his usual cameo into a surprising star turn Wednesday, felt that that sad history "really helped us -- it gave us that desire but more than that, the experience and know-how. We knew what we had to do to get past it." But first, they had to get through the season's low moment -- the New Year's Eve blowout at the hands of Gonzaga which left the Eagles 3-9 and in an abyss of self-examination. "Not to knock any of the (previous) groups," said Snow, "but I felt this group truly believed. We talked in the past about believing, but we had to go into tough atmospheres and pull things off. This year, teams had to come here. And even though we were 3-9 then, we could have been 12-0 or 0-12 and it wouldn't have mattered -- we had to win the conference championship. So there was never any panic." And now? There's only pride. "I'll have other opportunities," said Giacoletti, deflecting a question about personal gratification in getting Eastern over this final hump. "I think about the guys who were with us before _ the Aaron Olsons, the Chris Whites. Jamal Jones was here tonight, and Jason Humbert. All those guys played a part. Mike Burns (Giacoletti's former assistant, now at Washington State). I hope those guys have some gratification deep down inside. Hell, Steve Aggers. He really got this thing turned and headed in the right direction. "Every guy in an Eastern uniform for the last 20 years can pick up the paper and have a sense of pride." And relief. No longer one of sports' accursed are the Eastern Washington Eagles. They're in.
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