The Experience Of A Career

Last night’s 64-53 loss to the Duke Blue Devils at Madison Square Garden wasn’t just an Arizona State basketball team falling in an NIT National Semifinal.

This was the culmination of something special for the Sun Devils’ seniors and the start of something exciting for the youth who occupy lockers at Wells Fargo Arena.

This was the kind of game; running with a national powerhouse for 30 minutes, playing on a national stage, Dick Vitale on the microphone; that was never imaginable four years go.

This was a program mired in Pac-10 anonymity. ASU ran well behind the likes of Arizona, UCLA and Washington in what has been one of the most dominating basketball leagues in Division I basketball.

It was the program who scheduled games with Alcorn State, North Texas, North Carolina A&T, Delaware State and Utah Valley State. They even lost some of those payout games.

Now, in the 4th year of the Herb Sendek regime and coming off back-to-back postseason appearances and finding themselves on prime-time TV with the eyes of the the college basketball world on them…well…this certainly is uncharted territory for ASU basketball.

Most importantly, last night’s game was exactly what this specific team needed in the wake of an unexpectedly good start to 2009-10 off of losing their top two players from last season’s 2nd-round tournament squad.

For the seniors like Eric Boateng, Derek Glasser and Jerren Shipp, last night was the beginning of the culmination of a career in Tempe.

When Glasser and Shipp were freshmen (Boateng, of course, a transfer), Arizona State lost 15 games in a row and had a realistic chance of being the first team in conference history to go 0-18 in league. Despite the allure of James Harden on the horizon, it wasn’t a fun time to be a Sun Devil.

How far they’ve come in three years.

And what about this year’s crop of freshmen? They get the experience of being on the big stage just five games into their Pac-10 careers. Trent Lockett got to play 24 minutes and Ruslan Pateev got in for a few minutes as well. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Demetrius Walker and Victor Rudd get some time tonight against LSU.

More importantly, it’s the image of the program that get’s the biggest boost over what has happened so far in calendar year 2009.

In 2009, the Devils have swept UCLA including a win on national TV, advanced all the way to the Pac-10 championship game including a win over #1 seed Washington, won their first NCAA Tournament game in 14 6 years (thanks for the catch, David) and played Duke at Madison Square Garden, a non-conference game that would have never even been imagined as recently as five years ago.

This, folks, is truly something to be thankful for in our sports world.

It’s certainly not the program that suffered the indignity of losing to Utah Valley and simply playing North Carolina A&T.

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