CHICAGO — Standing at center court in the United Center on Sunday night, it took one slow 360-degree spin to understand the breadth of what Syracuse just did. In between the celebrating players — Final Four hats cocked in every direction, smiles that could’ve lit the way to Houston right then and there — were signs of a historic moment for the program and school.

Syracuse University Chancellor Kent Syverud, holding short passing conversations with his glasses nearly falling off his nose. Director of Athletics Mark Coyle, who had left a heartfelt voicemail to SU women’s basketball coach Quentin Hillsman three hours earlier and now had Jim Boeheim to seek out. New head football coach Dino Babers, soaking in the success and spirit of a Power Five program and likely daydreaming about his own team’s future.

And then there was Rakeem Christmas, sandwiched in between Tyler Ennis and C.J. Fair, watching his former teammates cut down the nets from the other side of the court. Christmas wasn’t trying to call attention to himself. Off the court, that’s never really been his goal. But it was hard not to pause on him while surveying the scene. It was hard not to look at him as a reminder of this time last season, when his college career prematurely ended due to a self-imposed postseason ban. It was hard not to, if for only a second, divert your attention away from the celebration and see a player whose senior season was sacrificed so this team could make the unlikeliest of Final Four runs.

Somehow it seems that it’s always the players who pay the price in college athletics — and that was no more apparent than with last year’s Syracuse team, which sat out of postseason play because of violations committed way before college coaches even started blowing up their cell phones. Christmas evoked this retrospective, probably unknowingly and most definitely unwillingly, just by standing on the court after the Orange beat top-seeded Virginia. 

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• Revisit Syracuse’s Final Four runs under Jim Boeheim

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So at Christmas’ expense for one last time, let’s agree on this: You can say what you want about Boeheim, Syracuse as an institution and whether or not the Orange deserved a Tournament spot in the first place, but the current players deserve this. The players who sat on their couches at this time last season have had to answer for the program’s past demons and lost their head coach for nine games a few months back, they deserve it. Because those players sacrificed and stuck around, they deserve it.

From the players’ standpoint, let’s partly view this Final Four run as a celebration of lost time. Because in an isolated world of college sports, where there’s only so much time to achieve anything worth achieving, these players have probably lost enough.

“We didn’t think we were like owed anything,” Michael Gbinije, SU’s starting point guard, said a day before his team upset the Cavaliers. “But at the same time this is very nice after last year. We’ve been through a lot, this team, so yeah it’s nice to be able to make a run after that.”

Syracuse (23-13, 9-9 Atlantic Coast) is just the fourth-ever double-digit seed to make the Final Four, but it hasn’t grabbed the nation’s collective heart like the first three. It actually has done quite the opposite. First the Orange was considered outside of the NCAA Tournament bubble. Then it was considered to have gotten an easy path to the Sweet 16 when Michigan State was upset set by Middle Tennessee State in St. Louis. Now, with a Saturday night game against North Carolina (32-6, 14-4) at Houston’s NRG Stadium, the narrative is that two teams mired by NCAA sanctions are set to meet on the sport’s biggest stage.

Is that narrative at least somewhat warranted? Absolutely, because we too often allow success in sports to turn our attention away from moral failure. But that narrative shouldn’t steer us away from the innocent players, especially if they were affected by violations they didn’t commit and sat tight through the ensuing storm.

Let’s consider that a handful of Syracuse’s current players could have left the team. Boeheim’s suspension was announced, scholarships were taken away and recruiting restrictions were slapped on. Gbinije and fellow fifth-year senior Trevor Cooney could have transferred and played without sitting out a year. Incoming freshmen Malachi Richardson, Tyler Lydon and Frank Howard could have said no thanks. And who would have blamed them?

But aside from the transfers of B.J. Johnson and Ron Patterson, which were centered around the opportunity to play more at smaller programs, everyone else stayed put.

Now they’re rewarding themselves, one improbable victory at a time.

“I’m happy I made the trip here and was able to witness this happen,” Christmas said on the court after the game. “… I’m just happy the team made it this year.”

That’s the narrative Christmas stuck with, that he went to three tournaments and a Final Four in 2013. That he feels no ill will toward the university or program after how his career ended. That he’s happy, selflessly, that these guys somehow have a fighter’s chance at winning the second national title in Syracuse history.

Yet no player, especially a senior hitting the apex of his career, should strive for the postseason for three months and then get blindsided by a decision made because of the past and for the future. The recent trend of self-imposed postseason bans in college basketball is troubling at best, calculated administrative moves infamously made in Syracuse last year, Louisville this season and, if the NCAA ever drops the hammer on North Carolina, possibly Chapel Hill down the road.

And because self-imposed ban seamlessly translates to “sacrificing one season for the benefit of the future,” it’s easy to let the players from that one season get lost in the shuffle. Christmas was a needed reminder that every player has a chance at a run that could morph into reality with a single play. Syracuse’s run isn’t about the magic of the NCAA. It’s not about the men in suits, far away from the court, charged with both monitoring the mess and cleaning it up years later. It’s not, if you’ll excuse me for a second, about SU’s head coach.

It’s about the players who weren’t allowed to play basketball one year ago, and are now getting the kind of attention they deserve.

Jesse Dougherty is a Senior Staff Writer at The Daily Orange, where his column appears occasionally. He can be reached at jcdoug01@syr.edu or @dougherty_jesse.

Published on April 1, 2016 at 1:43 am