Selection Sunday

St. John's basketball back to back champs let's go New York City! #149

I spent Saturday night screaming and cheering and trying not to cry during the men’s Big East tournament championship game at Madison Square Garden. St. John’s, the team I’ve rooted for my whole life, was poised to win back-to-back tournament championships, something they’ve never done before.

I was born a few months after St. John’s appeared in the Final Four, when fans thought it would be like that forever. It hasn’t. It has, at times, been very painful. I was a freshman at the school the year Mike Jarvis was fired. I’ve watched Fordham beat us more than once, and we lost to a team named Incarnate Word by more than 20 points.

But the pain in some ways connected me to a larger fandom, a community of people proud of the team and of Queens and New York City, all believing that things would turn around.

And it especially connected me to my dad. I’m a St. John’s fan because he was a St. John’s fan. He went to St. John’s, and I wen’t to St. John’s. Watching games was one of the things we did together — on TV, like we did for last year’s championship, or in person, at the Garden or Carnesecca Arena. For years, we shared the pain, and didn’t mind it if we got dinner or lunch before or after. Last year, we shared the joy until we lost in the second round of the NCAA tournament. But there was always next year.

On Jan. 3, after St. John’s lost to Providence at MSG, I called my parents to bemoan how badly the team played. I had gotten on the Jumbotron with my friend Michelle, which my dad and I had gotten on last season. “What a crappy game,” I said on speaker. My dad, who started chemo a few weeks before, was having a rough day. His voice was strained, which was one of the side effects, so he didn’t really talk. The lozenges I ordered that were supposed to help would arrive today, I said. We ended it with “I love you” and I biked down to a friend’s birthday at a movie theater, where we watched “Back to the Future.”

My mom and sister called during the movie, as Marty McFly was trying to get back to 1985. My dad collapsed at home, and was headed to St. John’s Episcopal Hospital. A friend called me an Uber and I went through the long drive from Chelsea to Far Rockaway trying not to think too much.

When my dad was diagnosed with cancer I envisioned so many bad scenarios, a long spiral of suffering ending in the worst thing, but I never imagined he could go quickly. So although he was sick the call from my mom that he didn’t make it felt sudden.

Once I got inside the hospital I checked in at the front desk, clutching the St. John’s Starter jacket I bought during my excitement the year before. I gave his name to a nurse who said she’d walk me over, then yelled out to a colleague where she was going. “Oh, expiration,” the other person replied. I saw it in that moment not as callous shorthand but a reminder of the way it is in a hospital, the way it is in a newsroom to a lesser extent during breaking news. It’s just part of the job.

My mom and sister were waiting in the room with my dad when I got there. You can’t prepare for something like that, no matter how much you worry about it. But dark humor has gotten me through everything else in life, so after a few minutes of being together I looked at my dad and blurted out, “I can’t believe the last thing you watched was that game against Providence.” My dad would have laughed, and maybe he did.

Later that night when we got back to the house I heard a thud on the porch. It was the delivery of lozenges and other things I ordered to help my dad, a reminder of how different life was just a few hours before.

The next few weeks were a swirl of emotions and a long list of things to do. There’s so much entertaining when a person dies, so many conversations, so many decisions. Whatever else we had planned was forgotten about, but I did keep paying attention to college basketball. And St. John’s, somehow, started and kept winning. They went on a 13-game streak through the end of February, the longest streak of my entire life. Jan. 3 seemed like an anomaly, a blip, and it also became a marker. In mid-February a TV announcer noted that the team hadn’t lost in 53 days and I then had a number for the last time I had spoken to my dad.

Maybe I wouldn’t feel this same emotional connection between him and our team if he died in July. If our last conversation was about the Mets, or about a concert, maybe I’d pin all these feelings to that. But this is when he went, so this is what I think about. (That he died at St. John’s Hospital and is buried at St. John’s Cemetery also must mean something.)

I felt a heavy mix of different emotions last night at MSG with my friend Brynn, who lost her dad two years ago and understands. I kept my dad’s prayer card in my pocket; we were sitting in the best seats we ever had. After St. John’s crushed UConn by 20 points Brynn and I stuck around for the ceremony, pushing our way down to the front with all of the other fans who wanted to experience it. Coach Pitino said during an interview played on the big screen that he knew how much the win meant to the fans and to New York City, and the place erupted in cheers. I thought of everyone else in that arena who wished they could celebrate a happy moment again with someone who was gone, and had to find a way to bring them along whichever way they could. I thought of all the fans who waited for next year, but next year didn’t come.

I felt joy and pain at once, up and down and back and forth like a basketball game, the only way to do it.

It starts over again today, when we find out who St. John’s is playing next in the tournament. I’ll be watching, and so will he.

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LISTEN

“The vital records of Mr. George Rex, ‘The Last Slave’” [LIT NYC]
I called in moments after the Gracie Mansion presser from outside The Mansion diner for this week’s FAQ

WATCH

You can relive last night’s game with this recap. Maybe you can hear me yelling “Cry more Hurley!” from my seat.

Thanks for reading!