Marek Dolezaj put his head down and sprinted, grabbing the ball and darting quickly back toward the referee. The time was stopped, but the internal clock of Dolezaj ticked. He looked up the court at the Blue Devils’ backs as they waltzed up the court. He begged for the referee to return the ball. He begged for another advantage. For another way to cut into the deficit further.

There were over three minutes left in the game and Bourama Sidibe had just set his feet and drawn a charge. The crowd erupted, but the Orange still trailed and remained resistant to triumph. Dolezaj slouched his shoulders and ripped his arm against his chest. He knew his team had to run, that they couldn’t sit back and be complacent. Yet the stoppage always came one way or another.

This was the game. It’s always been. The availability of top conference foes has dwindled in a down year in the Atlantic Coast. On its home court, Saturday’s game against the Blue Devils was the sapphire beam at the end of a stretch of five wins in six tries. If this oft-one sided rivalry ended in another Syracuse (13-9, 6-5 Atlantic Coast) win, SU could perhaps beat anyone. More importantly, it would have a chance to do so for longer. But a 97-88 loss to Duke (18-3, 8-2), close or not, halts the Orange to a similar place they started.

“You lose home games,” Dolezaj said. “That hurts you a lot.”

The game developed in a way comparable to SU’s past. Jim Boeheim said after the win over Pittsburgh that the Orange had only made minor changes, that a drastic improvement would be giving his team too much credit. A game like this, where for stretches SU seemed out of contention, always remained a possibility for a team not fully there. The early-season Orange would have lost by 30, Dolezaj said, but this is not the early-season Orange.

This Syracuse team has been looking ahead for weeks, proving its postseason beliefs were not in haste. SU remains one signature win away from formulating something similar that they do each season they sneak into the back-end of the NCAA Tournament. It has two more shots, against Louisville and Florida State. Still, a season of unpredictability can’t allow moral victories, losses that will potentially be overlooked come selection time. At this point, the Orange need to add to their resume. And on Saturday, they didn’t do that.

When Elijah Hughes opened the game’s scoring with a jump shot off a pivot in the lane, Joe Girard III immediately syphoned the crowd. It looked like the Orange would respond: Dolezaj streaked down the court and drew a foul, then the next play down the floor recovered a ball poked away and scored. Hughes stepped back on Duke’s Matthew Hurt, turned to the Blue Devils bench and sneered.

Unlike most games this season, SU rarely shot from the outside and rarely passed around the perimeter. The Orange took control through penetration at the top and bounce-passes into the lane: the antithesis of the Orange’s high-octane, high-scoring approach. Hughes said the option remained open as the Blue Devils sent two defenders to meet the penetrator. The style should have played into Duke’s hands. But for so long it didn’t.

“We just went with the flow of the game,” Hughes said. “Bourama (Sidibe) was left open, Marek (Dolezaj) was left open a couple times. So we just made the pass.”

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Syracuse led for all but 44 seconds of the first half, but eventually, things recalibrated. The inside game that Duke flashed so often strung together points. It hit its 3-pointers with the players who it knew can make them. Before SU’s lead vanished, a make and a stop put the ball back in the hands of Girard, who let little time run off before he rose and air-balled as Boeheim screamed behind him. Girard turned and patted his chest: “My bad,” he yelled.

The lead dwindled, then disappeared, then seemed so far away. Multiple stretches of SU bursts couldn’t push it closer than two possessions. Hughes cooled off. The defense lost its touch. There was always another reason for the crowd to come to an uneased, slouching silence. The energy drained. “We just couldn’t overcome that,” Boeheim said. At the 10-minute mark, the game appeared to be over.

In the second half, Syracuse reverted to the game plan its run with all season long, took 14 second-half 3-pointers and saw them finally go down. Off a 3-pointer from Buddy Boeheim, SU fouled Alex O’Connell and the guard who blew the heat off his hands after a pregame shootaround make missed the front end of the free throw set wide. Sidibe centered beneath it, but pushed it out of bounds. Buddy, who crouched ready for a pass, stood straight and put his hands atop his head. The runs started quickly but ended in a similar way. SU played a good Duke team to the final minutes, but even that can be deceiving.

“I don’t think we’re at all close to being good,” Dolezaj said. “Every day we can work on something. There’s a lot of things that can change.”

Everything about this game was different: two Girard missed free throws, 70 points inside the arc and an interior defensive battle that flirted with nearly 200 total points. But a win over the Blue Devils would have been unexpected, so the Orange needed something different. It looked like it might get it for a while.  

SU’s walk of shame after the final buzzer was something, however, that it had seen before. Players dipped their heads and plodded off the Carrier Dome floor, unable to secure a win on their home court yet again, the question marks of their season still floating above them. Syracuse needs something different, and perhaps another surprise.

Published on February 1, 2020 at 10:43 pm

Contact Michael: [email protected] | @MikeJMcCleary