It’s well and truly over.
Somewhere during last night’s game, I texted our group chat that this game was the this season of games. We were down like a million at the time; I didn’t know then how accurate that would be.
Can you say a team that battled back from down 23 didn’t show heart? Can you say a team that tripped over its own piece frequently enough to make a urologist cringe in getting down that far ever really showed up?
I’m not going to go into the particulars of how it got to that point. There is one sequence I’d like to isolate though. Xavier cut the deficit to 12 early in the first half, just doing enough to kind of keep it within touching distance. There wasn’t much life being shown, but they had yet to truly embarrass themselves. That was with 16:13 left to play in the game.
Xavier’s next six times down the court should have buried the game. They went turnover, possession with two missed shots, turnover, turnover, turnover, turnover. These were not the product of sensational defense by Georgia, either. It was a menagerie of soft passes, predictable feeds, and flaccid dribble moves. Six straight empty possessions can be disheartening; getting a shot up in only one of them is appalling.
What happened next made that stretch all the more vexing. From the time they got the ball back after that final turnover to the final horn, Xavier outscored Georgia 34-13. A team that couldn’t get out of its own way suddenly couldn’t set a foot wrong.
It wasn’t enough.
Georgia’s last bucket was a driving layup blocked by Lazar Djokovic, but a bizarre fluke of physics saw it squirt from between his hand and the glass like a spherical watermelon seed and catch the rim with enough english on it to spin through the hoop. Xavier scored, forced a turnover, had a shot blocked leading to a 15-minute ref show at the monitor, and ultimately failed to get the ball in the air with a chance to tie.
This is the closest we’ll come to a recap of the game. A season that was effectively smothered in its crib when Xavier lost two starters to injury/illness after the portal closed has finally come to its end. We’ve talked before about what might have been if only this team had been given the chance to play to its potential. Now the season draws to a close in fitting fashion, with all the valiance and fight shown by the players rendered moot by the fickle hand of fate and obstacles of the team’s own device.
Now we begin anew the countdown to November.