NCAA weekend most exciting yet
The most impressive image at the Carrier Dome on Sunday wasn’t the colossal stands carpeted in a sea of Connecticut blue and Maryland red.
It wasn’t Maryland head coach Gary Williams, drenched in Gatorade, tossing the net to his victorious Terrapins.
And, as nifty as it looked, it wasn’t a souped-up Dome dressed up in its finest attire for a national audience.
No, the most telling sight of Sunday’s regional final was the guy sitting next to me in Section 107 scrawling a message on the back of a postcard of the Carrier Dome. Seriously. They make Carrier Dome postcards. And apparently people buy them.
I suppose those kind of touristy things happen during weekends like this. And from all accounts, the thousands who visited Syracuse for the NCAA’s basketball bonanza departed an exhausted yet satisfied lot.
They sure did a number on local businesses, who handled the influx with extended hours. They did those funny things, too, like pay $8 for a program or shell out $3 for one strand of Mardi Gras beads at Dome souvenir stands.
This year’s East Regional, in the words of Sheraton general manager David Heymann, boasted ‘a heck of a lot more energy’ than the event did here two years ago.
Fans – two of college basketball’s finest sets – delivered pizzazz on Friday and Sunday.
There was the Maryland contingent shaking newspapers during the opponents’ starting lineups. There was the Connecticut crew and its ‘U-C-O-N-N! UConn! UConn! UConn!’ chant after every Husky run, highlighted by several hardcore fans contorting their bodies into the shapes of those letters. A couple of the Husky faithful even donned silver tinsel wigs that looked like the byproduct of a CVS after-Christmas sale.
Out of the spotlight, there were those quirky little incidents that made the weekend hilariously memorable.
– At team practice Thursday, Maryland’s Chris Wilcox launched an errant shot that bounced off the side of a ball boy’s head.
– Also during practice, CBS’s Jim Nantz sported a green mock turtleneck that looked like something off a Vail mountainside. His partner, Billy Packer, wore a lumberjack-style flannel. The pair appeared in a local news studio later that night wearing the same shirts. Do these guys really dress themselves?
– Thursday night, Duke alum and ESPN analyst Jay Bilas watched the first half of the Duke-Indiana game at the Sheraton’s bar. Bilas went to his room at halftime and no doubt gouged his eyes out with a pillow mint after the Blue Devils were upset.
– The weirdest sight at the Dome: The UConn Husky’s tail looks like a beaver’s.
Behind the scenes, there were folks truly working their tails off to make the event run smoothly.
So, kudos to Dome officials for changes that included ramps from the concession area to the Section 122-125 bleachers in front of the curtain and blue carpeting behind the baskets and around press row.
Twenty minutes before the start of Sunday’s game, workers placed orange squares of plastic film over the street-lamp-hue yellow lights outside the Dome. When fans left that evening, they walked out to the orange glow that could be seen from Interstate 81. Nice touch.
Security personnel were on the ball, too, handling the two-day crowd of over 58,000 that was the largest for any regional.
Down on Marshall Street, local restaurants lauded the extra crowds.
Faegan’s, normally closed on Sunday afternoons, operated from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
‘It was crazy,’ said Melissa Buckley, an SU graduate student who waited on a group from Sports Illustrated last Wednesday. ‘We probably doubled to tripled what we normally make.’
Pizza joints like Acropolis and the Varsity stayed open an hour and a half later on Friday night to accommodate the fans.
‘It was pretty funny watching people standing up and eating in the aisles waiting for people to leave,’ Acropolis employee Steve Papazides said. ‘It’s almost like having two weekends in a row here.’
Half a block away, the Sheraton sold out its 235 rooms, mostly to media and fans, for Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Heymann said. The hotel also hosted multiple tailgate parties, including a large one in its front circle on Sunday.
Maryland and Connecticut fans gathered in exclusive pockets along the sidewalk across the street from the hotel, eventually ambling across campus and into the Dome one final time.
As I exited with those blue and red disciples on Sunday night, the weekend handed me one final powerful image: The Maryland band standing awestruck beside its bus, celebrating a second straight trip to the Final Four, while, about 20 feet away, the UConn band gathered in a circle for a moment of somber reflection.
Thousands more poured out behind me, strolling by the bands as a rushing air forced them from the Dome. It’s like the only thing any of us – the bands, the fans, the locals, the tourists – could do was simply exhale.
