Men's basketball scrimmage capped a year to remember

I wasn't expecting it to be the best sports moment of my time at Princeton. Not when I first started walking toward Jadwin Gym that Saturday afternoon in March.

It was the second semester of my freshman year, and as the 1997-98 men's basketball season wound down, head coach Bill Carmody and his team had decided to have an intrasquad scrimmage at Jadwin. The exhibition was open to the public, with free pizza available for all. The idea was to get the Tiger players something resembling a live game experience as they went through an excruciating nine-day layoff between the end of the Ivy League regular season and their first-round NCAA tournament game.

And what a regular season it had been. It was the type of year that can only really be appreciated by those who were lucky enough to experience it. For those of you who didn't, there are only stories.

Stories of fans arriving two hours before tip-off to get seats in the student section. Stories of bleachers shaking and baskets wobbling. Stories of students coming home from an evening's game and watching the recap on SportsCenter — ESPN's nightly wrap-up show would broadcast highlights after every Ivy contest Princeton played that season.

There are many college basketball fans on this campus, and we all have particular teams we've rooted our whole lives. I've met Kansas fans, North Carolina fans, Duke fans — all of whom live for March Madness every year, hoping their respective teams will cut down the nets on Championship Monday. This coming spring, even if Princeton wins the Ivy League and makes it to the NCAA tournament, I imagine many of us will still keep some focus on the bigger picture — can my Tar Heels or Blue Devils or Jayhawks bring home the hardware?

And there's nothing wrong with that — that's the type of environment I expected to find when I arrived on campus as a freshman and certifiable sports nut.

But 1997-98 was different. That season, there were no other allegiances. When discussing teams you hoped to see in the Final Four, you talked about Princeton, first and foremost.

And you did so with a straight face. I'm not sure many people actually thought the Tigers would get that far, but the possibility was real.

Make no mistake — there was no better place to be a college basketball fan. For one season, this campus experienced what places like UCLA and Stanford enjoy every year in terms of school spirit and on-court success. But for us, it was even better — because it was so new and so unexpected.

Of course, along with all this publicity came added pressure the likes of which the Tiger program had never seen before. When you enter the NCAA tournament with a 26-1 record, a first-round loss has a way of negating everything you've accomplished previously.

There was a lot at stake in that NCAA tournament game. Win, and a season's worth of magic would be validated. Lose, and it would be one of the biggest letdowns in the history of Princeton basketball. The detractors who said Princeton didn't deserve a high seed in the NCAA tournament would be proven right, and the regular season would have been fool's gold.

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And maybe that's the reason I and so many others went down to Jadwin that afternoon — for one final bit of reassurance before the tournament that the brilliance we had been watching all year long wasn't just a mirage. If that's what we were searching for, we would not be disappointed.

Just to get into Jadwin, fans had to navigate through a small city of tents set up outside the facility. The Tigers had united the student body in a way only an athletic team really can. In its home-opener early in the season, Princeton had played in front of a half-empty student section. Now, for an exhibition scrimmage, those same bleachers along the sideline were almost full, and fans had been camping out — sleeping in those tents — to buy NCAA tournament tickets.

The Tigers were divided up into two teams, one wearing the light home jerseys and the other wearing Princeton's road darks. Carmody officiated the 40-minute contest, and all the regular rules of college hoops were in full effect. If anyone thought this would be a Midnight Madness-style show in which turnovers outnumbered shot attempts, that notion was dispelled early.

Princeton was indeed in postseason form — playing the type of picturesque basketball that would eventually lead to an easy win in that dreaded first-round game. Soon after the scrimmage began, fans quickly realized something: The only thing better than watching a Princeton team run its brilliantly orchestrated offense was watching two Princeton teams execute it to perfection in the same game.

With no opponents in the building, there were no "sit down, you suck!" cheers. The "safety school" taunts took the day off. It was just a loud symphony of ovations for every back-door layup and three-point bomb that pierced the net.

Not only that, but everyone in a Tiger uniform got into the act. Guard Sean Gregory '98, a fan favorite who played sparingly that year, began knocking down threes from all over the court. Forward Antony Taylor — now a senior and no longer with the program — took off for a pair of thunderous breakaway dunks.

Like all great contests, this one was full of drama, with the light jerseys and the dark jerseys trading baskets and leads, all the way down to the final seconds.

With his white-clad team leading late in the game, guard Brian Earl '99 went to the line to try to put the game out of reach. After a phantom lane violation called by Carmody, the dark jerseys got the ball back, trailing 77-75. Still, the best they could do was find forward Gabe Lewullis '99, who could only fling a 70-foot push shot in the general direction of the basket as the game came to an end.

It had been a remarkable 40 minutes, during which the Tigers had showcased the same skill and precision that had taken them to such heights throughout the season. But there have been a lot of skilled and precise Princeton teams over the years. This team was something more.

There was just something about that Tiger team that set it apart. It had a certain toughness and confidence — a flair for the dramatic. The Tigers had an ability to do things conventional wisdom said couldn't be done — not just once, but over and over again.

Travel to Carolina, hold Antawn Jamison to six points and take the Tar Heels down to the wire? Impossible. But Princeton did just that. Climb to No. 8 in the national rankings? Preposterous. But late in the season, the Tigers were ahead of even eventual national champion Kentucky.

Students camping out for tickets during midterm week? Unfathomable. But by the time March rolled around, there they were. This was truly a special team, and if you were a student at Princeton that year, you got the feeling that nothing was impossible.

As if fired out of a cannon, Lewullis' shot sailed downcourt — then ripped straight through the net as time expired. Three points.

Final score: Dark Jerseys 78, Light Jerseys 77.

And that was how it ended. That was the final home appearance by the 1997-98 Princeton men's basketball team. History says the Tigers played a pair of NCAA tournament games that year — one electrifying win over UNLV and one torturous loss to Michigan State. But as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't get any better than that Saturday afternoon, when they gave their fans one last chance to revel in a season nobody will ever forget.

In my time here at Princeton, I've been to some truly extraordinary sporting events — both as a civilian and as a reporter. I sat courtside when the men's basketball team rallied from a 27-point second-half deficit at Penn in 1999 and journalists around me abandoned the protocol of concealing emotion during games. I saw that same men's hoops team beat N.C. State in the Wolfpack's final game ever at magnificent Reynolds Coliseum.

I saw the women's basketball team beat Harvard in 1998 to end the Crimson's 32-game Ivy winning streak. And at the 2000 men's lacrosse Final Four, I watched Bill Tierney choke back tears at a press conference when describing the heroic efforts of his two sons.

But if I had a chance to recreate one Tiger athletic moment from the past three-and-a-half years, there's no doubt about which one I'd choose.

Just give me a pick-up game starring the 1997-98 men's basketball team and its loyal fans — who, for a few months during my freshman year, joined forces to turn Princeton into heaven for any die-hard sports fan.