NEW YORK — Standing at the podium in the New York Athletic Club on Wednesday, Big East commissioner Mike Aresco announced the league reached a multi-year extension for the conference tournament to continue to call Madison Square Garden home.

Aresco didn’t expand on the announcement, saying the famous venue will serve as host for “many years to come.”

“We all know what the Garden has meant to college basketball and what the Big East has meant to the Garden,” Aresco said. “It’s a legendary place and our teams have contributed to that status over three decades.”

The Big East tournament has become synonymous with Madison Square Garden, which has provided a grand stage for some of the most memorable moments in college basketball. The five-day grind is a coveted prize for conference members who fight for the championship while making a final push for NCAA Tournament bids.

“The Big East isn’t the Big East without the tournament,” SU guard Brandon Triche said. “And it being where the mecca of basketball is — New York City and the Madison Square Garden — it makes it that much greater.”

The 2013 Big East tournament will be the final stop for Pittsburgh and Syracuse before they move to the Atlantic Coast Conference after the season. Syracuse has made Madison Square Garden into a second home over the years, and Pittsburgh head coach Jamie Dixon said New York City and the tournament hold extra meaning to his program as he recruits heavily in the area.

Even five months away from that final conference tournament, Triche is looking forward to it as he has every year.

“You think about your regular-season games and you want to win those,” Triche said. “But then you also kind of fast forward to the Big East tournament because it’s one of the highlight moments.”

Last round with Georgetown

This season will also mark the end of Syracuse’s conference rivalry with Georgetown, one of the greatest in college-basketball history. The pair will meet as Big East foes for the last time in the regular season finale on March 9 in Washington D.C.

It’s a day Georgetown head coach John Thompson III admits he is waiting for with anticipation and excitement.

“It’ll be special,” Thompson III said at Big East media day on Wednesday. “The Georgetown-Syracuse tradition is more than a rivalry; it’s a tradition that has been a part of the fabric of this conference.”

Syracuse leads the all-time series 48-39. The rivalry defined the Big East during the 1980s as the conference established itself as a power nationally. The Hoyas went to four Final Fours and won the 1984 national championship under John Thompson Jr., Thompson III’s father. Meanwhile, SU head coach Jim Boeheim steadily built his program into a winner, taking the Orangemen to the 1987 Final Four.

The rivalry remained a constant highlight for more than three decades, but SU’s imminent exit from the league signals the end of the series as conference opponents.

Thompson III said Syracuse will establish new rivalries as it jumps to the ACC, and Georgetown will continue to battle with the returning Big East members.

But it will take years for SU to generate the history that made the rivalry with Georgetown special. And none of the Big East holdovers can quite replace the Orange as the Hoyas’ main nemesis.

It’s a void both Georgetown and Syracuse hope they don’t have to fill. But the future of the 33-year rivalry remains uncertain.

“I’ve said — I think Jim said the same thing — we want to keep playing each other, but now it falls into the category of out-of-conference scheduling, which is much more difficult,” Thompson III said. “You have many other problems to overcome, so it’s not as cut and dry as saying, ‘Yes, we are going to do it.’

“But I think we both have a desire to continue.”

Published on October 18, 2012 at 2:55 am

Contact Ryne: rjgery@syr.edu