As Preston Shumpert walked onto Jim Boeheim Court for the final time Sunday, arm in arm with his mother, Cindy Miller, he saw the ghosts of his Syracuse University past.

He remembered playing great games and making better friends. He pondered how this season was supposed to go and how quickly it turned. He recalled arriving at SU as an unrecognized freshman and how he could leave shouldering the load of a lost season.

‘I wasn’t really thinking about it before the game,’ Shumpert said. ‘But once you go out there, it really kicks in.’

Indeed, the emotional avalanche hit Shumpert all at once, and he did something teammates had never witnessed: He wept. As Shumpert tried to hold back those tear drops, wiping them away with his warm-up top while waving to the roaring Carrier Dome crowd, he reached down to embrace Miller.

Miller held her son tight, whispering, ‘This is your day. Go out there and give it all you’ve got.’

Shumpert did just that, fighting his way through double teams to score 23 points and grab 11 rebounds in SU’s 69-65 loss to Boston College on Senior Day. More importantly, Shumpert looked for his shot late in the game, something he hasn’t done recently. He scored 12 of SU’s final 16 points in the closing eight minutes to lead the Orangemen on a 14-3 run that saw them tie the Eagles at 63 with 1:30 left.

Shumpert’s three-pointer with 4:37 left pulled the Orangemen — down as many as 14 in the second half — to within four and lit a fire under the Dome crowd, whose roars Shumpert rhythmically bounced to as he held his follow-through position.

‘The last few games,’ Shumpert said, peeling bags of ice off both knees, ‘I sort of rushed myself and put added pressure on myself that I don’t need. Tonight, I just let it hang out, played free and had fun.’

But this season has been anything but a pleasure cruise for Captain Shumpert and his Orange mates. Losers of eight of its last 12, Syracuse likely needs to win at least one game in this week’s Big East Tournament to ensure an NCAA Tournament bid.

The year wasn’t supposed to play out like this. This should have been the glorious final act of Shumpert’s opus.

It was choreographed like this: Shumpert navigates a promising, yet naive, group of players through the rigors of a Big East schedule, teaching them how to win along the way.

But at some point, the Orangemen veered off course.

Maybe it was before the season when Billy Edelin was suspended for violating school rules. Or maybe it was when one player left permanently (Mark Konecny) and another departed temporarily (Jeremy McNeil). Maybe it was head coach Jim Boeheim missing three games due to prostate surgery, or maybe it was Shumpert being hampered by an eye injury.

Whatever it was, the Orangemen failed to rid themselves of the offensive errors and turnovers that plagued them at the beginning of the season. As Boeheim said: ‘We made these (turnovers) at the beginning of the year, we’re making them now.’

All the while, Shumpert tried to lead the squad as best he could. And all the while, teammates insisted that Syracuse has no single leader.

‘We’re all leaders,” point guard James Thues said. “There’s no one leader. It’s just that everybody goes about leading in their own way.”

Shumpert’s leadership tactics varied from those of last year’s captain, Allen Griffin. Griffin was expressive. Shumpert is usually even keel.

‘Preston always puts his little two cents in,’ McNeil said. ‘It’s just different between him and Allen. Allen would make us have team meetings and stuff. They’re just two different people.’

And those tears?

‘I’ve just never seen Preston cry,’ McNeil said. ‘I’ve seen Allen do stuff like that a lot of times.’

As tough as the season has been for Shumpert — amid the pressures of preseason expectations and the tumult of team problems — he’s retained a few lessons along the way.

‘This is basically the year where the younger guys just learn that you can’t turn it off and on,’ he said. ‘You can’t go out one game and be on top of your game and go out the next game and just expect people to lay down for you.’

Shumpert learned, too, that you can never count on expectations. He took with him four years worth of friends and memories and just happened, for once, to leave a few tears behind.

Published on March 3, 2002 at 12:00 pm