So this is what Syracuse basketball has become.

The haven of a shaken superstar, the worst student section in the Big East and a team unable to string together 40 respectable minutes.

It came as no surprise, then, that Preston Shumpert, the infrastructure of the SU team, looked battered and abused when he finally trudged to his locker after a 30-minute shower.

With deep blue pockets under his eyes, Shumpert looked toward members of the media for answers instead of responding to their questions.

After another pathetic Orangemen performance in a second-half collapse you had to be expecting, Shumpert didn’t know what to say.

“You can tell people whatever, but at this point they got to take it personally,” he said. “We’ve had a team meeting, but not everybody says something.

“I don’t know. I guess you just get back at it in practice and hope everybody makes a decision to be ready to play for the team. I don’t know what I can do. What can I do?”

He did about all he could on the court yesterday, scoring 18 of his 28 points in the second half.

But it meant nothing. Shumpert still watched a series of Pittsburgh highlight-reel dunks with his teammates as the clock ran down. He still had to listen to the Carrier Dome go silent and clear out. He had to have sensed another big game going bad.

Shumpert and his teammates must be sick of pointing to each game as a must-win only to leave with another loss and another game to target as essential.

First, Syracuse needed to beat Pittsburgh on the road, then it was Georgetown and then Rutgers. Sunday, Syracuse dropped it’s fourth straight must-win, leaving players’ heads spinning.

“This is a bad loss,” freshman Josh Pace said. “It hurts more than any. We just came out so sluggish in the second half.”

At least they came out, which is more than you could say for Syracuse students. The section behind the south basket, reserved for student seating, was almost entirely empty.

In a game between two of the leaders of the Big East West, Syracuse students turned in their most apathetic showing yet — which says a lot.

“Anywhere we go on the road there are more students than anything, but at Syracuse it is more older people who aren’t attending the school,” sophomore James Thues said. “That is not fair to us because we represent the school. It’s hard to get up for a game when your own fans don’t really seem to care.”

But it’s hard to watch a game with the lingering suspicion that no matter how well Syracuse plays in the first half, it will find a way to lose. And to think it was only six years ago that students and players alike reveled in an improbable Final Four run for a thriving basketball program.

“We are digging ourselves a big hole,” Kueth Duany said. “This was a big game for us. We needed this game. We lost a big one, but we got to dig ourselves out. The way things are going, we are coming to a crossroads.”

Right now, it looks more like a dead end.

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Asst. Sports Editor Eli Saslow’s columns appear regularly in The Daily Orange. E-mail him at eesaslow@syr.edu

Published on February 10, 2002 at 12:00 pm