Joyce Hergenhan, a lifelong Syracuse fan, donor and member of the Board of Trustees, walked into a New York City deli with SU head coach Jim Boeheim shortly after 3 a.m. on March 13. Syracuse had just won one of the greatest games in college basketball history, 127-117, in six overtimes over Connecticut at Madison Square Garden.

A group of UConn fans approached them. Here was their opportunity to tell the rival coach what they really thought.

And that’s exactly what they did.

‘They thanked him for giving them the opportunity to watch the greatest game they had ever seen,’ Hergenhan said. ‘It was a wonderful moment in sports.’

So it was.

XXXX

Mike Monacelli would have slept on a bench in Penn Station just to see the end. He and fellow SU sophomore Trenton Gaucher were not leaving Madison Square Garden before the final buzzer. It wasn’t even an option. Getting home was an afterthought.

So they waited, trying not to peek at their watches as time slowly slipped by. The last train back to New Jersey left at 1:20 a.m. After that, they were on their own.

Missing it didn’t seem possible. The track was footsteps from their seats. No way the game wouldn’t end in time. No way they wouldn’t make it home.

‘One train went by, then another went by, then another, and we’re glancing at the clock freaking out about the game and about being stranded,’ Monacelli said. ‘There was only one train left. We had to make a decision now.’

Monacelli didn’t call his parents during the game. They may have told him to leave. When the last train pulled away, Monacelli and Gaucher looked at each other from their seats and waved goodbye.

Afterward, they migrated to a waiting area in Penn Station with hundreds of others in the same situation. Nobody knew how they were getting home. Nobody seemed to care. It was mass hysteria, Gaucher said. Marshall Street had moved 250 miles south.

‘All the crazy things that happened, all the hysteria,’ Gaucher said. ‘Who cared about going home? What’s one night in a train station when you see history?’

Fortunately, they never had to find out. Monacelli’s dad realized they were stranded and rushed to pick them up. As they left, people asked where they were going, begging for a ride home. One of them lived nearby. Monacelli agreed to take him home.

They thought they were fortunate to leave Penn Station. At first, at least. When they arrived home sometime after 4 a.m., they couldn’t help but wonder if the party in the waiting area was still raging on.

XXX

For 24 hours, John Groat’s life was a series of blessings. And if not for each one, he never would have sold 55,000 Marathon Men T-shirts.

It started in a concourse of Madison Square Garden. Groat, the founder of Holy Shirt!, had tickets for the upper deck. He struck up a conversation with a Louisville fan who was leaving after the Cardinals finished their game. Groat offered to buy his floor seat stubs. The man did Groat one better: He gave him the tickets for free.

Sitting so close to the court, Groat could see the exhaustion on the Syracuse players’ faces as the game dragged on. To him, they almost looked dead. That was when the idea for the shirt first blossomed. ‘I didn’t want to let the thought get too far at that point,’ Groat said. ‘I didn’t want to jinx it.’

When the game ended, the process began. He called his brother, Chris, in Syracuse and started brainstorming. ‘I kept saying, ‘This is a marathon. We just witnessed a marathon,” Groat said. ‘It just hit us.’

Groat was stuck in New York and couldn’t help put the plan into action. Chris was in charge. He and the 20 full- and part-time employees arrived at the store at 7:30 Friday morning and went to work.

Holy Shirt! sent the finished product to the bookstore at noon that day. In three-and-a-half hours, they drew the art, had it approved, made the stencils, registered the stencils on the press and used seven printers to complete the finished product. It was the fastest turnaround in store history.

The bookstore sold 500 of the 800 that day alone, even though students were on Spring Break.

The greatest blessing of all came that night, when Syracuse took on West Virginia in the tournament semifinal. Chris drove down to New York with a few shirts in hand for John and his friends. They wore them at the game that night. Television cameras closed in on them wearing the shirts. ESPN commentator Jay Bilas talked about the shirts on the air. As they left the Garden that night, a reporter from Sports Illustrated approached them. There was a story about the shirts on SI.com the next morning.

‘It was like having a national six-figure television ad for free,’ Groat said.

The bookstore was supposed to be closed the next day, but they decided to open at the last minute, knowing the shirts would sell. The remaining 300 from the day before were gone in 15 minutes. From there, the bookstore started keeping a list of all the people who wanted to buy one. They sold 5,000 that day alone.

The sales haven’t slowed down. The term ‘Marathon Men’ has entered the college basketball lexicon. For a lifelong SU fan like Groat, that’s perhaps what he is most proud of.

‘We came up for a nickname for this team that stuck and will become a very small footnote in the history of Syracuse University sports,’ Groat said. ‘Other people came out with shirts. But there is only one ‘Marathon Men’ T-shirt.’

XXX

Kelly Wachter will live the rest of her life having to explain why she didn’t see the game. For someone who has been a big SU basketball fan since she arrived on campus four years ago, that sounds like sacrilege. But cut her some slack. It’s not her fault the Big East tournament was during her last Spring Break as a college student.

‘In 30 years, and people hear I graduated from Syracuse, they’re going to ask me if I saw the six-overtime game,’ said Wachter. ‘And I’m going to have to tell them why not.’

Wachter was in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, with a group of eight girls. One bar in town showed American television, and it was far from their hotel. In Mexico, it was only 7 p.m. – far too early for a horde of spring breakers to go out for the night. Cab fare was expensive, anyway.

They wound up in a restaurant, La Terraza, knowing the game was starting but with no way to follow it. Wachter put her cell phone in the middle of the table and waited for updates.

For three hours, Wachter and her friends sat around the dinner table, anxious to know what was happening, trying not to shout and bother everyone else eating dinner. Wachter’s mother and boyfriend sent text messages every five minutes or so. Whenever the phone beeped, the whole table jumped, desperately waiting as Wachter read the latest dispatch.

Some of the texts made sense. Others were a jumbled mess. Her friends at the table were shouting out questions. Who had fouled out? Who was playing well? Wachter passed them along.

‘It sucks we weren’t in Syracuse,’ Wachter said. ‘Everyone would have gone nuts. We would have run on the quad. It would have been insane on Marshall Street.’

Now that would have been a sight to behold.

XXX

Jonathan Michael Frechette never wanted to go out that night. He was thrilled to watch the game by himself from his California home. He had his beloved Orange on the television there for company. Frechette grew up in Oswego a lifelong Syracuse fan. Graduate school at Long Beach State recently relocated him out west.

In California, Frechette feels like a loner – a diehard for an East Coast school in a state known for its apathy toward sports.

One of his friends called, saying his cousin was in town, and they were heading out. Frechette thought about it. He didn’t want to miss any of the game, but figured it would be on TV wherever they went.

They walked into a bar. The game was on. Frechette sat and watched, his eyes glued to the set. Nobody else paid any attention. They were too busy drinking and talking to care. Frechette groaned when Connecticut took control in each of the first couple overtimes. He yelled when the Orange somehow came back. His friends and the people around him tried to ignore it.

The third overtime ended, and disaster struck. The bartender said the place was closing. They had to leave. ‘I’m there completely amped up, trying to figure out why this bar is closing at 10 o’clock,’ Frechette said.

They rushed on, found another bar. Frechette figured he was in time to see the fourth overtime. Wrong. Disaster No. 2 struck: It was karaoke night – every sports fan’s worst nightmare.

‘At this point I’m thinking, ‘I just wish I had stayed home and watched the game,” Frechette said.

So Frechette went outside by himself, leaving his friends confused. There he stood for three overtimes, watching the score update on an iPhone application, shivering in 45-degree weather with no jacket. After years in California, you get used to warmth. People walking in and out of the bar gave him quizzical looks.

‘Since they won, it did some justice to the fact I was freezing out there,’ Frechette said.

Yeah, it was worth it.

XXX

The walls of the Blarney Rock Pub have seen a lifetime of Syracuse basketball history. SU fans congregate at the Blarney Rock, located about a block away from MSG, before, after and during every Big East tournament game. It is a tradition that has existed for years. No one is quite sure when or how it started, but if you’re a longtime Syracuse fan, you go to the Blarney Rock.

The six-overtime night was different. Never before had the bar been as loud, as crazy. Tim Tully, a bartender and nighttime manager, worked through all of SU’s greatest Garden moments, including Gerry McNamara’s famous run in 2006. Even that didn’t compare. On this night, the place was completely full. Tully estimated there were about 250 people in the tiny pub.

‘Nobody was drinking. Everybody was just staring at the television,’ Tully said. ‘Every time Syracuse got a score, the place absolutely shook.’

When the game ended, though, that’s when the party really started. People poured out of the Garden, walking down the street toward the Blarney Rock. It got so crazy, the police came to check on things. ‘From Madison Square Garden to the Blarney Rock, all you could see was orange,’ Tully said.

For the rest of the night, chants of ‘Let’s Go Orange!’ pierced the room. One fan bought beer, shook up the bottle, and sprayed it on everyone around him. When it was empty, he bought another beer and did it again.

The celebration was still going strong at 4 a.m., when the Blarney Rock closed. Tully said they ran out of Labatt Blue, a beer they stock specially for Syracuse fans during the Big East tournament. Tully said it was the first time that ever happened.

‘Everyone from Syracuse was at the Blarney Rock that night,’ Tully said. ‘I don’t think there was anyone left in Syracuse.’

XXX

Two days after the game, Jim Boeheim put the game in perspective. Syracuse had just lost to Louisville in the Big East tournament final, but the UConn game was still on his mind.

‘Five years from now there’s going to be two things people remember about this Syracuse basketball season, two and only two,’ Boeheim said. ‘They’re going to remember the Connecticut-Syracuse here and going to remember what we do in the Tournament. That’s all that they’ll remember.’

Syracuse ended its season two weeks later with a forgettable loss to Oklahoma in the Sweet 16 – an underwhelming end to the Orange’s best season in years. The sting of that game may take time to heal, but when fans look back on the 2008-09 basketball season, they will always remember Six in the City.

jediamon@syr.edu

Published on April 19, 2009 at 12:00 pm