NEW YORK CITY — A little part of you has to be relieved.

The car-accident ending to a Syracuse season you couldn’t help but watch finally ended last night, leaving only the NIT before the season goes in the books. You can pull your eyes away.

The once-promising Orangemen regular season campaign started with the preseason NIT championship at Madison Square Garden, and petered out at the same arena last night. In between the two dramatic extremes, Syracuse ran around a pointless track that did nothing but frustrate you and devastate the team. Be glad it’s over. They sure are.

For two months, walking into the Syracuse locker room has been like walking into a hospital. Sure, there was the lingering depression, but there was always that hope that things would get better.

Thursday, the locker room felt more like a funeral. Heads in hands, whispering and even a tear or two from Jeremy McNeil. All 12 Syracuse players and a handful of coaches sat fixed in their locker room chairs, mourning the season they had wasted.

“I’m tired of coming back into the locker room and feeling so frustrated,” point guard James Thues, his words barely escaping the hands and towel that buried his face. “I can’t do this anymore. We have to do something about it.”

And they did. In what has become the typical Syracuse loss, the Orangemen surrendered a double-digit lead to Villanova in the first round of the Big East Championship and, in doing so, surrendered any logical chance to play in the NCAA Tournament.

The 2002 campaign will yield nothing of importance.

With another NIT on its postseason resume, this team will be stuffed in the back of the record books and buried at the end of the media guide. Worse yet, the young Orangemen proved last night that they failed to improve and build a foundation for next year.

With under four minutes left and down just three, Syracuse proceeded to lose the game by making all the mistakes it made earlier in the year.

Foul trouble, a constant theme of the season, cost Syracuse its second-leading scorer when DeShaun Williams fouled out on a charge.

Thues, a remarkably poor free-throw shooter, bricked all four of his freebie attempts, including the front end of a one-and-one with two minutes left.

Josh Pace made a first-time-on-the-court freshman mistake, blindly throwing a ball away in the final minutes.

Worst of all, the up-and-down effort that leached to the Orangemen all year reemerged again — even in the most important game of the season.

“We keep making the same mistakes,” Williams said. “We play in spurts. Sometimes we play with intensity and then other times we don’t.”

“We didn’t have the intensity all game,” Kueth Duany said. “But we didn’t make our shots at the end and we had some uncharacteristic turnovers. Give them credit. We didn’t collapse. They hit their shots.”

Coincidentally, last night was the fourth game in a row in which the other team just made the big shots. More importantly, for the fourth game in a row, Syracuse didn’t make the shots that mattered when the game was ticking away.

That’s the mark of an NIT team. The type that might not collapse but certainly won’t hit the clutch shots that win close games.

“You know,” coach Jim Boeheim said, “everyone we have played and lost to, they have been good teams.”

And Syracuse really isn’t.

Eli Saslow is an assistant sports editor at The Daily Orange, where his columns appear regularly. E-mail him at eesaslow@syr.edu.

Published on March 6, 2002 at 12:00 pm