Hofstra 71, James Madison 69 (Or: Happy Happy Joy Joy)

I'll teach your grandmother to suck eggs!

Mo Cassara had tried just about everything to coax a win out of the Flying Dutchmen and end the longest streak of bad luck in college basketball this season. He yelled and he provided verbal pats on the back. He worked the Dutchmen hard in practice and he eased up. He expressed frustration at press conferences and he expressed optimism. He implored the Dutchmen to channel the 2004 Red Sox and the 2011 New York Giants.

Turns out all he had to do was ditch his sport coat.

With his coach displaying an ultra-rare look on the sideline, Stevie Mejia drove the lane and converted the winning 3-point play with just over six seconds to go before he provided the suffocating defense at midcourt that clinched the Flying Dutchmen’s 71-69 win over James Madison. The win, the Dutchmen’s first CAA win in 321 days (but who’s counting?), finally ended the second-worst conference start in Hofstra history, a stretch in which the Dutchmen lost seven games by a mere 42 points.

“It’s like the weight has been lifted,” Cassara said from Richmond Saturday night. “It was a big-time winning play. We’ve been talking about how we’ve got to make more winning plays and we had a bunch tonight. Fortunately we were able to make enough down the stretch to win the game in a hostile environment.”

When Cassara flung off the coat, though, it looked like the Dutchmen were destined to suffer yet another gut-wrenching loss. Cassara, a superstitious sort in all facets of life but particularly when it comes to his game day attire, is the anti-Shaka Smart when it comes to his suit jacket: It stays on. Always.

Yet he ditched it in fury with 1:16 left Saturday, right after James Madison took its first lead in almost 16 minutes on a dunk by Enoch Hood. Cassara was already furious over what happened about 90 seconds earlier, when, with the Dutchmen nursing a four-point lead, Dwan McMillan fouled out on the second worst charge call of the week. Actually, this one might have been even worse, since McMillan was at half court when it happened.

(Note: It wasn’t worse than Dennis Allocco’s travesty)

Humpty Hitchens (HIM AGAIN) drained a 3-pointer on the Dukes’ subsequent trip to pull James Madison within 62-61 and even Cassara was thinking the Dutchmen—who were up by nine points in the first half and by eight points earlier in the second half—were doomed. He was so furious he took off the coat because the sleeves were restraining him and “…I couldn’t swing my arms fast enough.”

The Dutchmen were in the midst of one of their best games of the year and were winning even though Mike Moore (10 points on 3-of-10 shooting) was bottled up. And they were finally getting contributions from everyone: Dutchmen reserves scored just seven points in the previous two games but Mejia, Shemiye McLendon and Moussa Kone ended up with 19 points on 8-of-11 shooting.

And yet it was happening again. “I was just so frustrated,” Cassara said. “It was like a Twilight Zone. Playing our butts off and then we just can’t get a break.”

But unlike the previous seven losses, the Dutchmen made their own breaks down the stretch and finally got a couple things to go their way. David Imes, who scored a team-high 11 points in the first half, pulled down two rebounds, one on each end of the floor, following the Hitchens 3-pointer and hit three of four free throws—his only points of the second half—to give the Dutchmen a four-point lead again.

Imes’ defensive rebound came when after the Dukes missed two shots in the paint, including a thunderous dunk by Hood. It was Imes who had one of the Dutchmen’s two missed dunks against Northeastern in a 64-62 loss and Imes who accidentally tipped in a missed Drexel free throw in the 60-54 loss to the Dragons Wednesday.

Then A.J. Davis’ 3-point play and Hood’s dunk finally put the Dukes ahead, Nathaniel Lester—who had another huge second half and scored 17 of his 23 points after intermission—drained a 3-pointer to give the Dutchmen the 68-66 lead.

“I’ve got to credit coach [Pat] Sellers,” Cassara said. “We went through a little rut in the second half, they were just doing so much to take away Mike [Moore]. And [Sellers said] ‘Gotta go to Nat, Nat’s hot, he’s got a good shot, we’ve got to keep going to him.” We called his number a bunch of different times and he hit some big shots.”

But Lester ended up needing Mejia to save him from misery. Lester stole the ball on James Madison’s next trip and, after a timeout, missed a layup with 23 seconds left. Hood slammed home a dunk on the other end, was fouled by Mejia and hit the free throw to put the Dukes up 69-68.

“When Nat misses that layup at the end of the game and they get a 3-point play, they go up, I was like ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’” Cassara said.

The Dutchmen didn’t have a timeout, but Mejia—who was the third option on the play behind Moore and Lester—got the ball from a heavily covered Moore, drove the lane, hit the layup and was fouled by Hitchens. Mejia, who had hit just 11 of 25 free throws, drained the free throw and then pressured Devon Moore into losing the ball at half-court. Despite contact being made, no foul was called, and the Dukes didn’t get a shot off before the buzzer.

It was a cathartic layup for Mejia, who has struggled badly and lost his starting job to McMillan since suffering a hamstring injury against Boston University Nov. 27. Mejia’s three field goals Saturday marked the first time he had multiple baskets in a game since Nov. 26—the day the Dutchmen stunned Cleveland State.

During a chat in his office last week, Cassara implored Mejia to focus less on what has gone wrong this year and more on the next year-and-a-half. “I’m just so happy for Stevie Mejia, he has been such a shell of himself,” Cassara said. “Stevie and I had this long heart to heart the other day. He’s starting to get healthy—maybe 75 to 80 percent—and mentally he wasn’t. He’s just so frustrated. He’s wanted to do so well and hasn’t been able to.

“I said to him ‘Listen: We’re not talking about Rhode Island anymore or this injury anymore. What we’re going to do is make this a successful year-and-a-half for you, on and off the court.

“Later on he texted me and [said] ‘Thank you. I feel so much better.’ He played that way today. Just so happy for him.”

And after ending the losing streak, Cassara found out that plenty of people were rooting for him, as well. “My phone just blew up—texts from people around the league, ADs, coaches,” Cassara said. “People knew how close we were. It wasn’t like you’re a bad team and you can’t win. It was like, hey, this is a pretty good team, just haven’t been able to catch a break.

“So I really appreciate that. I think that’s a sign that this is not a bad team. Just a team that has been, between injuries and various other things and some tough luck, hasn’t been where it would like to be.”

3 STARS OF THE GAME (vs. James Madison, 1/21)

3: Nathaniel Lester

2: Stevie Mejia

1: David Imes

SEASON STANDINGS

Mike Moore 41

Nathaniel Lester 27

Dwan McMillan 17

David Imes 9

Shemiye McLendon 9

Stephen Nwaukoni 8

Stevie Mejia 5

Moussa Kone 2

Bryant Crowder 2

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

Hofstra 92, James Madison 90 (Or: It wasn’t easy, but then nothing is. WHOO HOO!)

Sometimes I wonder why I keep a running score at Flying Dutchmen basketball games. After all, this is the second decade of the 21st century, halcyon days in which pixel-stained homer scribes such as myself can get our hands on a full boxscore, complete with play-by-play and substitution patterns, no more than 20 minutes after the buzzer, even on nights in which the copy machine is busted.

How often will I need to refer to the running score in between tipoff and getting the final boxscore? Does the once in a while it comes in handy for Tweeting make up for the fact it is irrelevant by the time I get home and that my apartment is already filled with notebooks I will never look at again but won’t ever throw away? (That sound you heard was my wife yelling at me)

And then there are nights like Monday, in which I can refer to the notebook to know the exact point at which the 2,324 people at Hofstra Arena, as well as the Flying Dutchmen themselves and the dozens of Hofstra staffers located throughout the Arena, realized we were all a part of a special communal experience:

it wasn’t ez but it never is

Actually, “never is” was a single scrawl that looked like a worm, but there’s no real way to type that. Anyway, I frantically jotted those words down as Blur’s “Song 2” blared during a timeout with 3:30 left in regulation and the Dutchmen mounting a furious comeback that resulted in a enthralling, surrealistic, goosebump-inducing 92-90 overtime win over James Madison that will go down as so much more than one of the greatest regular season games ever played at Hofstra.

Granted I’m a cheeseball who came of age in the ‘80s, which means I try, with no sense of irony, to find deep meaning and symbolism in arena rock. But doesn’t that lyric—blaring over the loudspeakers right after consecutive 3-pointers by Charles Jenkins and Shemiye McLendon cut an eight-point deficit to two and brought those in attendance to delirium straight from despair without even a passing glance at cautious optimism—sum it all up?

Doesn’t it describe how the magic of Monday was in how 11 nail-biting minutes—in which the Dutchmen erased an 11-point deficit and then held on for dear life to their overtime lead in order to remain tied for first in the CAA heading into tonight’s showdown against fellow co-leader VCU—served as a microcosm of the entire season and the program that Mo Cassara is building as well as the euphoric ride the Dutchmen are enjoying just as much as their small yet loyal and, hopefully, expanding fanbase?

Anyone at the Arena Monday, even the casual observers, knows the back story, which was written about ad nauseum here from June through November and everywhere else the last two weeks. It was a season that could seemingly only be salvaged in the movies. But here it is, the end of January, and it’s no longer strange to envision Jake Taylor—err, Charles Jenkins—telling the Dutchmen the only thing left to do is win the whole bleeping thing.

“I don’t think anybody in here thought we’d be 8-1 right now, including myself,” Cassara said. “But this team is coming together as a group and as a family and they believe in each other. And that’s really from great leadership [which] starts at the top with Charles and Greg.

Fact is sometimes better than fiction and nobody could have scripted this start, nor just how that eighth victory was manufactured. The Dutchmen were down by as many as 15 in the second half. There was a span of more than 15 minutes—from 9:45 of the first half through the 13:46 mark of the second—in which they did not string together consecutive scores, during which Hofstra was outscored 36-21.

They were down nine when David Imes fouled out with 7:10 left, which left the Dutchmen further weakened against Denzel Man Beast Bowles (27 points, 10 rebounds), and were down 11 with a little more than six minutes to play. Like at any point in the preceding eight months, there were plenty of reasons for the Dutchmen to give up, plenty of evidence suggesting they were undermanned and could do nothing more than quietly fade away.

Yet once again, they did not. The Dutchmen forced five turnovers in the final six minutes of regulation, as many as they forced in the first 34 minutes, as they outscored James Madison 21-10 and held the Dukes without a shot in the final 3:43. Yves Jules, who played four minutes, made his only statistical contribution count by stealing the ball in the paint in the final seconds to force overtime. When McLendon, a freshman, hit two free throws with 17 seconds left, it marked the first time the Dutchmen had not trailed since the 7:21 mark of the first half.

Jenkins scored the Dutchmen’s first six points (and the last of his 35 points to go along with five assists, three blocks, three rebounds, two steals and one turnover) of overtime and the Dutchmen led 90-83 before surviving a furious Madison rally. The final points of the game were scored by freshman Stephan Nwaukoni, a 55 percent free throw shooter who missed the previous two games for disciplinary reasons who calmly drained two free throws with three seconds to play.

“It’s an incredibly resilient group and that goes from top to bottom,” Cassara said. “Our staff is the same way. We believe we can win every game and we’re not going to give our guys any excuse to not think that. And we found a way tonight late to fight and hang in there, hang in there, hang in there and then all of a sudden a couple shots fall and then our defense picks up a little bit.”

And with no Greg Washington (who had the game of his life with 13 points, 11 rebounds and five blocks in a career-high 42 minutes before he fouled out with 53 seconds left in overtime) to fend off Bowles, it was up to Jenkins to wrest the ball away from Bowles following the intentional miss of a free throw by Julius Wells with two seconds left and hang on to it until the buzzer finally sounded.

“It’s just our will to win that we have,” Jenkins said. “[At the] beginning of the season, something that me and Greg said [was] ‘We have every excuse not to be successful. We had all the odds against us. We have our first-year coach. We lost all these players and we had all this stuff happen in the offseason.

“I think our ability to just let everything go and just go play basketball is starting to show.”

So, too, is the bond between the team that had no choice but to continue keeping the faith and the fans who chose to do so. What happened Monday was rare—players and fans realizing, simultaneously, that something special is happening and feeding off each other’s energy. Everyone and everything was in sync. Never has “Don’t Stop Believing”—which began playing immediately after the regulation buzzer—sounded so good, or so appropriate, in the last week of January.

Once the victory was complete, Jenkins leaped into the student section with the rest of his teammates pouring on to the court behind him. “I wanted to embrace them—if my arms were big enough, I could give them all [hugs],” he said.

I’ve been to a lot of games at Hofstra, but I don’t remember a communal experience like Monday. Sure, sold out home games against George Mason, Nebraska and Old Dominion in 2006 were unforgettable and electric, but there was a certain temporary feeling to those games, as if whatever was going on was not sustainable, that many of those in attendance were just there because Hofstra basketball was momentarily hot.

Hey, maybe I’m being too optimistic here. If there was a Mo Cassara Fan Club, I’d not only be a member, I’d be the president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, ombudsman and head maintenance professional. But this feels different—as if Cassara is not only building a program but has also found the secret to building a fanbase that eluded Tom Pecora and Jay Wright.

“I’ll tell you what, this was a good crowd in here tonight,” Cassara said. “The thing now is anybody who came tonight saw a great, exciting game. They’re going to come back and they’re going to want to come back. I think the George Mason and James Madison games at home, people are going to be excited to come back here.

“It just helps with the excitement here in the arena, it helps with the overall excitement for the program. I’m happy for the university, I’m happy for the president, I’m happy for Jack [Hayes] and Danny [McCabe] and everybody involved. It’s been a long offseason and the offseason’s over now and we’re moving forward and it’s really an exciting time. I’m happy for everybody.”

It wasn’t easy to get to this point, but it never is. Whoo hoo.

3 STARS OF THE GAME (vs. James Madison, 1/24)

3: Charles Jenkins

2: Greg Washington

1: Shemiye McLendon

SEASON STANDINGS

Charles Jenkins 50

Mike Moore 24

Greg Washington 19

David Imes 14

Dwan McMillan 5

Shemiye McLendon 3

Brad Kelleher 3

Yves Jules 1

Stephen Nwaukoni 1

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

Hofstra 68, James Madison 48 (Or: When I thought I was ready to give up on the season…the Dutchmen go AND TOTALLY REDEEM THEMSELVES!)

Me and Sully Ray--err, Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne--sport ear-to-ear grins after a cold drive home from James Madison this morning.

The task ahead of the Flying Dutchmen eight days ago was deceptively simple: Win three in a row, over a trio of teams that were sub-.500 in the CAA and overall, and suddenly the first home game of February against championship contender Northeastern would matter.

Of course, three wins in as many games seemed to be an awful lot to expect out of the Dutchmen, who won just twice in their first nine games of the conference season and were in the midst of a five-game losing streak in which each defeat was more demoralizing than the last.

As fans, it was better not to think too much about the possibility of a three-game winning streak for fear of setting ourselves up for more heartache. Just assume the Dutchmen would stumble somewhere along the way and win just once or twice during the three games against UNC Wilmington, Delaware and James Madison, hold out hope for a potential Towson-like run in the CAA tournament and look ahead to better days in 2010-11.

But now…now they’ve done it. Now they’ve gone and won three in a row. Now, after a 68-48 win over James Madison last night that was the Dutchmen’s most thorough and impressive in months, we are so very tempted to believe again.

The Dutchmen are 5-7 in the CAA, all alone in seventh place and a mere two games behind suddenly skidding William & Mary for sixth place. They are only the second team since the CAA expanded in 2001-02 to start 2-7 or worse and enjoy a three-game winning streak in the second half and one of only two teams in the CAA currently in the midst of a three-game winning streak (VCU has also beaten three straight sub-.500 teams).

Time to salivate over a quarterfinal rematch with George Mason in the tournament quarterfinals? Maybe not, but all the flaws of January looked fixed last night, when the Dutchmen were efficient on offense, dominant on defense and ruthless when presented with an opportunity to finish off James Madison in the second half.

“I think it was similar to the way we played at Towson in early December,” Tom Pecora said via phone after the Dutchmen landed back on Long Island. “I just thought it was a team effort to play within themselves. It was good. It’s good to be healthy. It’s good to be able to go to the bench and know they’re at full strength when they get their minutes.”

Five Dutchmen had at least nine points, led by Charles Jenkins with 20 points. Chaz Williams had just two points but oversaw an offense that produced 15 assists, the Dutchmen’s most in a win since they had 20 against Fairfield Nov. 30. He also continually broke the Dukes’ full-court press in the second half, when the Dutchmen had just five turnovers—less than half their first half total of 11.

Defensively, the Dutchmen limited James Madison to 34 percent shooting, the third straight game in which an opponent has shot 36 percent or less. The Dutchmen allowed opponents to shoot at least 45 percent in each of the final four losses of the five-game skid.

James Madison’s top two scorers, forwards Denzel Bowles and Julius Wells, scored 15 points apiece, but constant double teams on the 6-foot-10 Bowles limited his effectiveness and didn’t allow him to have the type of monster game that big men such as Charlotte’s Shamari Spears and VCU’s Larry Sanders have had against the Dutchmen. Bowles entered the game averaging 21 points and 9.9 rebounds a game but had just two boards and drew four fouls, which rendered him almost invisible in the second half.

“He was tired—we kept throwing different bodies at him, doubling him a bunch of different ways,” Pecora said. “We kind of got him out of rhythm early.”

Cornelius Vines, meanwhile, continued his strong defensive play by draping Wells, who was just 4-of-15 from the field and scored 11 of his points after the Dutchmen already led by double digits.

The most encouraging development of the night for Pecora was the performance of the Dutchmen’s oft-maligned veterans, who accounted for 87 percent of the Dutchmen’s offense (59 of 68 points).

That was the largest percentile of points by upperclassmen in a victory this season and second-largest overall behind the loss to VCU (the veterans accounted for 66 of the 68 points the Dutchmen scored in a game in which Williams did not play). Against Delaware Saturday, the veterans accounted for just 51 percent of the points (39 of 77), the lowest percentage in a victory this season and the second-lowest overall behind the loss to George Mason Jan. 4.

The veterans were particularly effective in the second half, when they combined to score 33 of the Dutchmen’s 38 points, including the first 21 as the Dutchmen turned a 30-25 halftime lead into a 51-39 advantage. Sparked by five points from Jenkins and four points from Greg Washington, the Dutchmen went on an 11-0 run immediately after James Madison missed two 3-pointers that would have tied the game at 32.

Washington scored eight of his nine points and pulled down nine of his 12 rebounds in the second half (and, it should be noted, was pulled immediately after hitting a layup for the Dutchmen’s final points with 1:25 left even though he was one point shy of the double-double. You know why? Because Pecora sweats class and elegance, that’s why!).

Other second half stalwarts for the Dutchmen included Miklos Szabo, who had six of his 12 points and six of his eight rebounds after intermission, and Nathaniel Lester, who scored eight of his nine points and pulled down both rebounds in the final 20 minutes.

Lester scored all his points in a span of 2:24 as the Dutchmen maintained a double-digit lead. He’s had eight points or fewer in 14 games this season, including seven of his previous eight entering Wednesday.

There would be no second half fade for the Dutchmen, who have blown second half leads of at least six points in five losses this year but whose lead remained at least 10 points for the final 16 minutes Wednesday.

“I think we played like a mature team,” Pecora said. “Our seniors playing the way they did really [lifted] us. Our ability to extend the lead in the second half, in their building, was very important, I thought.”

Of course, as encouraging as the victory was, plenty of caveats apply: Much like UNC Wilmington and Delaware, James Madison is another lower-tier squad enduring a nightmarish season. The Dutchmen are 5-0 against teams in the bottom half of the conference but have yet to author a performance anything like Wednesday’s against anyone in the top six, against whom they are 0-7.

Still, though, it seems appropriate the win Wednesday evened the Dutchmen’s overall record at 12-12— right back to square one as they prepare for Northeastern and another chance at that elusive Signature Win. It’s getting to be awfully tempting, this idea that the first half of the conference season was a matter of everything going wrong at once—a brutal schedule, an undermanned roster and some general bad luck combining to suck all the confidence out of the Dutchmen—and that February is once again shaping up as the best month of the season for the Dutchmen, who are 39-11 in regular season games played after Feb. 1 the last seven years.

“[It] can really define our season, if we find a way to win Saturday and keep our climb up the standings,” Pecora said. “If we play the way we played tonight, we can beat anybody. No doubt about that.”

3 STARS OF THE GAME (vs. James Madison, 2/3)

3: Charles Jenkins

2: Miklos Szabo

1: Greg Washington

SEASON STANDINGS

Charles Jenkins 44

Chaz Williams 24

Halil Kanacevic 19

Nathaniel Lester 18

Miklos Szabo 17

Greg Washington 12

Cornelius Vines 9

Yves Jules 1

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

Defiantly Dutch: It’s not just a blog name anymore

Is it too early to cast the lead roles in the movie about the 2009 Flying Dutchmen football team?

The most pivotal win of the Dave Cohen Era had it all: Defensive stands, big plays on offense and gutsy calls by the coaches on the sideline. But the most notable thing to take place Saturday occurred less than half an hour after the Flying Dutchmen shocked no. 7 James Madison, 24-17, and consisted simply of one word that was spoken twice yet delivered with an unmistakable swagger that seemed right out of the Joe Gardi Era.

“Yeah, yeah,” sophomore quarterback Steve Probst said as with a smirk on his face as he sauntered into the Margiotta Hall media room.

The implication was clear: Nobody else thought the Dutchmen would do this, so take that.

“These guys definitely looked past us,” Probst said at the podium. “They’re playing Richmond next week, so they want nothing to do with a smaller crowd. Coming up to New York, it’s an eight-hour bus ride. In my opinion, they looked past us and we just punched the right in the face and we took it from them.”

Apparently, sometime between the end of the 47-0 loss to Richmond Sept. 19 and the opening kickoff Saturday, the Dutchmen decided to channel the 1994 team. Emboldened and embarrassed by that defeat—which Dave Cohen twice dubbed a “debacle” in his post-game press conference Saturday—the Dutchmen are suddenly displaying an attitude equal parts carefree and defiant.

This is a team that now plays with a collective chip on its shoulder and whose players are motivated by being overlooked, either by their opponents or in high school by bigger and more established programs. It’s a team that—warning! bad pun ahead!—prides itself on making up for any talent disadvantage by outhustling and outworking an unsuspecting opponent.

The new attitude manifested itself on both sides of the ball Saturday. The two-QB system that I’ve always supported parlayed resourcefulness and some aggressive play-calling into just enough offense. James Madison had no answer for the Dutchmen’s “zone read” offense operated by Probst and Cory Christopher, who combined for 76 of the Dutchmen’s 154 rushing yards.

When the Dutch did go to the air, the main weapon was under-recruited tight end (“What’s a tight end?” ask the graduates of the run-and-shoot days) Dave Wilson, who had four catches for 65 yards and caught the first two touchdowns of his career.

“A lot of people didn’t give me a chance,” Wilson said. “[Cohen said] ‘We’re going to do some things here. We’re going to make everyone else regret it.’”

The Dutchmen were 4-of-5 on fourth down conversions, including 2-for-2 on a drive spanning the third and fourth quarters that produced no points but ate up more than nine minutes. “They can’t be that surprised, we’ve done fake punts in the last two years from our three-yard-line and our 20-yard-line,” Cohen said. “So they can’t be completely shocked. But honestly, that had to do with the confidence that I had [in] our offensive line and our running game establishing the line of scrimmage.”

Defensively, the Dutchmen allowed James Madison to convert 8-of-15 third downs but limited the Dukes to just 10 points on two trips inside the red zone. A week earlier, the Dutchmen produced a goal-line stand in a 24-10 loss to Western Michigan. In addition, the Dukes collected just 192 yards of total offense, barely half as many as they had (375) in last year’s 56-0 thrashing of the Dutchmen.

“Inevitably, turnovers and third and fourth down stops, to me, come down to your motor, your effort and your energy,” Cohen said. “And I just think the last two weeks, we’ve probably outhustled our opponent, quite frankly, our defense versus that offense.”

Deron Mayo, who at 5-foot-11 was the smallest defensive end listed on either team’s two-deep charts Saturday, racked up nine hard-hitting tackles, including three for a loss and one sack in a performance that earned him CAA Player of the Week honors. He could serve as a symbol of the defiant Dutchmen defense, if only that honor wasn’t already held by another perpetually hungry 5-foot-11 player.

All-American candidate Luke Bonus had nine tackles himself Saturday, but it doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that Cohen was playing up his intangibles after the game. “He walks in the room and he looks like he’s probably a pretty good student [and] on a lot of intramural teams,” Cohen said. “And if that’s not what you want your defense to stand for, I don’t know what kind of defense you want.”

Now, of course, Cohen doesn’t have quite the same ammunition as Gardi when it comes to lathering the Dutchmen into an us-against-the-world, nobody-at-all-believes-in-us fury. The Dutchmen are on equal footing, scholarship-wise, with their opponents. They play in the best I-AA conference in the land and the facilities at Hofstra compare favorably to those of their CAA rivals.

And let’s face it: If people were less than serious about the Dutchmen before Saturday, well, the Dutchmen had nobody to blame but themselves. They entered the game 7-14 in their last 21 contests, during which they’d lost six games to ranked opponents who outscored them by a tidy 249-47 margin, including two losses to top-ranked teams by a combined score of 103-0.

But hey, whatever works. Part of being a coach and an elite athlete is finding any sort of slight to use as motivational fuel, even if it’s a “debacle”—to use the word Cohen uttered twice to describe the Richmond loss—of internal doing. Uniting in the aftermath—as the Dutchmen apparently began doing during a meeting Sept. 23—of such an embarrassing defeat sure beats the alternative.

“Obviously, when you work as hard as these guys work, emotionally, you’re hurt, you’re embarrassed by that type of game—you’re frustrated,” Cohen said. “And we just had a little sit-down and we got this thing right. Cory and Luke Bonus and Aaron Weaver and the guys around me, they made this thing right. Cory said ‘that type of game could ruin a lot of groups of 100 men.’ And it didn’t. They used it to their advantage.

“After the debacle, it was almost like, all right, let’s go back to having fun. And that’s what our locker room, our guys, committed to doing.”

And the Dutchmen of 2009 are, in many ways, as overlooked and underappreciated as their 1994 brethren. They are overshadowed in the laughably loaded CAA by monsters such as James Madison, Richmond, Delaware. They are still ignored by the student body and within the community (announced attendance Saturday: 2,751) and the most powerful supporters of the program are no longer in positions of influence.

Those issues didn’t go away Saturday. But for one afternoon, at least, the defiant Dutchmen (shameless, gratuitous plug/pun) turned the clock back to 1994 and embraced the role of the furious underdog in a fashion that had to make Gardi smile up in the luxury boxes.

“Last season, man, we were talking about this after the game—that type of game [against James Madison] can just make you reconsider your own thoughts about playing football,” Christopher said. “[To] get this victory, I’m just so proud to see these looks on these guys’ faces. That’s why you do it, you know? To see how much fun we had, it’s just an amazing feeling right now.”

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

Hofstra 99, James Madison 96 (Or: It’s times like these, time and time again…)

They were two throwaway lines, the first of which I actually threw away, that would prove to summarize one of the very best games ever played at Hofstra University.

I didn’t like how long the original title to Wednesday’s blog looked, so after a few hours, I returned to the admin and ditched the sentence “I don’t want to oversell it, judge for yourselves.” I figured what was left was more than enough to indicate the urgency and potential impact of the game.

As it turned out, even my intentionally overwrought headline did not oversell what happened Wednesday, when the Flying Dutchmen outlasted James Madison, 99-96, in a double overtime classic that was equal parts exhilarating, exhausting and euphoric. And, oh yeah, lifted the red-hot Dutchmen into a tie for fourth place in the CAA with two games left in the season.

The second throwaway line was the first sentence of the post, an easy way to get right to the point and an excuse to link to a favorite song. It ended up also serving as the appropriate soundtrack for a game that had the potential to be great and ended up being so much more than that, more for what it represented than for what transpired.

As compelling as the game was, it won’t be our Woodstock. Today, tomorrow, next week, next year—this won’t be one of those games in which 10,000 people swear they crammed into an Arena that can barely hold half that. It’ll remain the little secret of the 2,816 who were in attendance, all of whom will smile at the recollections and remember how this game reminded us why we fall in love with sports in the first place.

Sports unfairly test and exploit our devotion, especially once we hit adulthood and find ourselves wondering why we invest so much time in something in which we have no control and why we keep coming back even though the people who run the teams and play the games so often treat us like we’re idiots.

Quite frankly, we keep coming back because the world sucks and we want a diversion, no matter how foolish it may seem. We keep coming back because we remember how pure the games once seemed and we hope to recapture that feeling.

We keep coming back for the occasional night like Wednesday, when the routine becomes transcendent.

Madison was missing Andrey Semenov due to illness and lost starters Devon Moore and Dazzmond Thornton to injuries within a three-minute span in the second half, yet it made up an eight-point deficit in the final 7:49 of regulation despite making no substitutions and scored 51 points overall in the final 17:30. All 96 of its points were scored by six players. Juwann James, who has missed multiple games this season due to a heart condition, shrugged off a pair of collisions in the paint and played 36 minutes off the bench.

Hofstra was missing Greg Washington due to illness, lost Greg Johnson to a shoulder injury on the first possession of the second half and saw three post players (Arminas Urbutis, Dane Johnson and Darren Townes) foul out during the overtimes. Yet the Dutchmen, susceptible to Wall Street-sized shooting slumps, shot a season-best 53.8 percent, scored 32 points in the overtimes (they’ve scored 32 points or fewer in a half 29 times this year) and finished one point shy of the program’s first 100-point effort since Feb. 29, 1992, one day after Charles Jenkins turned three years old.

Many a season has been ruined when the future of a program becomes the present at the expense of the guys whose careers are mostly in the rear-view mirror, but the precocious duo of Jenkins and Nathaniel Lester were complemented by seniors Zygis Sestakos and Darren Townes, each of whom has been out of the rotation for extended periods of time this year. Jenkins had one of the all-time box scores (32 points, a career-best 13 assists, seven rebounds and a team-best four steals) and Lester (22 points and 11 rebounds) had a double-double two minutes into the second half.

Townes shattered his previous season highs with 15 points (on 6-of-7 shooting) in 39 minutes while Sestakos hit three 3-pointers in the second overtime, the first two of which tied the score and the last of which gave the Dutchmen the lead for good. Sestakos set career highs with 19 points in 43 minutes. He played 33 minutes and scored 12 points over a 13-game span from Dec. 20 through Jan. 31.

In the end, the last of the 195 points was the first for the Dutchmen’s Mike Davis-Saab, who sat the entire second half and the first 9:27 of overtime before he was pressed into duty by the mass DQs. And the last of the 124 shots was taken by Madison’s Scooter Renkin, who sat for the first 49 minutes and 57.5 seconds before he hoisted his first 3-point attempt of the season.

Renkin’s shot fell harmlessly to the floor, finally ending a game as pure as it was deceptively simple. It was one of 101 Division I games Wednesday and one of the dozens of off-the-BCS-path contests played in obscurity without a broadcast crew in the joint and only a handful of reporters typing away on press row.

It was no frills: Just two well-coached teams brimming with cohesion, chemistry and resiliency, playing themselves to exhaustion and beyond and rewarding everyone in the building. In times like these, who can ask for anything more?

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com. And join the Defiantly Dutch group at Facebook today!

Hofstra 69, James Madison 68 (Or: Back For The Attack)

And you thought Dokken and mullets were no longer relevant.

To see the Flying Dutchmen residing above .500 in the CAA at the halfway point of the conference season following a dramatic 69-68 win over James Madison is to, once again, remind me of my academic career.

I remember strutting into the living room (OK, fine, it was physically impossible for me to strut…it was 1988 and I was sporting a mullet, my face was dotted with acne and I wore a jean jacket with a Dokken patch along the bottom of it, are you satisfied?!) with a decent report card, expecting Mom and Dad to genuflect at my all-around awesomeness. Instead, any complements I received were of the “yeah, but…” variety, as in yeah, but imagine how well I could have done had I not waited until halfway through the marking period to begin paying attention.

Such tempered praise was a reminder that earning a passing grade by pulling multiple all-nighters and acing two or three consecutive tests to end the marking period doesn’t mean your work is done, or that Mom, Dad and your teacher forgot about the poor performances that necessitated the progress report that spelled out, in gory detail, just how badly Junior was on pace to fail.

And let’s be honest: The progress report 11 days ago—after the wire-to-wire loss to Drexel 13 days ago dropped the Dutchmen to 2-4 in the conference—was not good at all. With red-hot Northeastern, struggling William & Mary and surprising James Madison next on the docket, 3-6 appeared to be the best-case scenario.

So yeah, being 5-4 and holding down the fifth seed is fantastic in a disaster-is-averted sort of way. But it’s not good enough for Tom Pecora, who preached patience when the Dutchmen were skidding but is expressing little, if any satisfaction now that the season has been saved.

As he said following the win over William & Mary last Wednesday, Pecora thinks the Dutchmen are a lot better than their current record, even if it took a great deal of effort to get to this point. (I’m going to assume Pecora’s reliance on teaching/parenting analogies just means we’re both traveling the same genius wavelength).

Along those same lines, I imagine he’s not doing cartwheels over the apparent return of Charles Jenkins, who scored 23 points and capped the evening by doing his best Danny Ainge impersonation (hey Litos, check out the bumper music there) when he drove from end to end and hit a beautiful, don’t-try-this-at-home jumper in the lane with 1.9 seconds left to give the Dutchmen the win.

It was the second straight Saturday in which Jenkins scored 23 points. But Pecora still expressed caution over Jenkins when he was asked during last Monday’s CAA teleconference if the sophomore was back to his old self.

“Time will tell,” Pecora said. “Down at Drexel, he only had 10 shot attempts. We were really upset with that. We expect him to get shots up and we expect him to stay aggressive offensively…he came out and played more aggressive offensively and we hope he continues to do that.

“I’m not quite ready to jump on the bandwagon yet. We’re cynical when it comes to these things. It’s going to take some time to prove it to me.”

Pecora’s skepticism proved to be well-warranted. Jenkins took just 11 shots against William & Mary, though he missed a handful of minutes late in the second half with a leg cramp, and started slowly against both Northeastern and James Madison. The similarities in the 23-point contests are uncanny: Against Northeastern, Jenkins was 3-of-9 in the first half and 5-of-7 in the second half. And against James Madison, he was 4-of-11 in the first half and 5-of-8 in the second half.

That’s not to say Saturday was bereft of unequivocally encouraging developments. A team doesn’t improve to 8-1 in games decided by five or fewer points without having an intestinal fortitude that is as impressive as it is innate. This narrow win might have been the most impressive one yet. On the road against one of the league’s hottest teams, the Dutchmen trailed for all but a few seconds of the first 30 minutes yet still managed to pull out the type of victory that might be looked back upon as a turning point.

And while Pecora might not be thrilled with the way the season is going, the Dutchmen cannot doubt the faith he has in them. Tony Dennison was just 3-of-14 from the field, but for the third straight game, he got hot during a pivotal second half stretch: He was 3-of-7 and scored eight of his nine points during a stretch of more than seven minutes in which the Dutchmen outscored the Dukes 22-12 to turn an eight-point deficit into a two-point lead.

Pecora has been demanding of Nathaniel Lester, but Lester scored a season-high 11 points and led the Dutchmen with seven rebounds—the third time in nine games Lester has at least tied for the team lead in rebounds. In addition, Lester’s shift to small forward coincided with the second half comeback.

And as for the decision not to call time out after James Madison’s Juwann James hit the second of two free throws and to allow Jenkins to travel the length of the court in an all-or-nothing move? It elicited one of the best quotes of this or any other season: “Who’s going to criticize me?” Pecora told Newsday. “People who don’t do this for a living and sportswriters. I’m undefeated in games that I watch on TV, too. We know the character of our players.”

The Dutchmen are hot and Pecora is hot under the collar. Watch out.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com. And join the Defiantly Dutch group at Facebook today!