Kotloff | More than just a heartbreaker

When the final buzzer sounded Tuesday at Princeton’s Jadwin Gymnasium, Jack Eggleston’s legs gave out from underneath him.

Minutes earlier, the senior’s jump shot with 1:16 left in regulation had launched the Quakers into overtime.

With the extra session, though, came Eggleson’s ‘Oh, no’ moment: sixteen seconds from victory, he dove on a loose ball and called a timeout that Penn did not have. The resulting technical foul allowed Princeton to tie the game on a free throw.

But the indelible image of the 223rd Penn-Princeton battle was Eggleston crouched on the court, just a few feet away from where Zack Rosen’s last-second heave landed harmlessly, ending the game with the score Princeton, 62, Penn, 59.

Head in hands and a Comcast Network camera jammed into his face, Eggleston didn’t leave the court until Rosen, his co-captain, picked him up by the jersey and escorted him to the locker room.

Nothing summed up this roller-coaster of a basketball game — and how painfully it ended — better than the scene that played out postgame, 72 hours after the Harvard nail-biter.

Penn coach Jerome Allen, a veteran of the 109-year old rivalry, said he had never seen an ending as crazy as this one. Like magic, the Quakers transformed a 1-point lead into a 3-point loss in the span of 16 seconds.

Senior guard Tyler Bernardini, his voice hoarse, spoke out for the team’s current veterans. How badly do you want a ring, Tyler?

“More than anything,” he asserted. “I can’t describe it here right now. If you told me to go home and write an essay about it, I couldn’t do that either. I want a title so bad.”

“You look up in the rafters, and you see everybody who’s won one and to think that my time’s coming to an end and I still don’t have one — every time we walk in the gym, it hurts a little bit. So when you drop two like we just did, it’s just like…” Bernardini sighed. “What do you even say?”

Rosen was left speechless for seven seconds after being asked what he had to say postgame. Then, after a sigh similar to Bernardini’s:

“Alright, well, the quicker we can bounce back, the better off we’ll be getting on the road Thursday … It sucks, but life goes on.”

For Rosen and Bernardini, the lifespan of their Penn basketball careers extends one more season. But the title is there for the taking now; even green freshmen like Miles Cartwright can sense that.

“We want to win, and we want to win now. Nobody thinks we can, but we know we can,” Cartwright built up the strength to say. He wouldn’t, however, affirm that the team — Eggleston in particular — is desperate.

“Desperation? I don’t know,” Cartwright said. “But there’s definitely a sense of urgency from [Eggleston], and it trickles down to all of us.”

By this point, long gone was Captain Jack, who slowly made his way to the team bus, in no mood to speak to the media. After two draining defeats, the Quakers have dug themselves a two-game hole in the Ivy League, and Eggleston has but nine games left to go out as a champion.

The clock’s ticking.

BRIAN KOTLOFF is a junior communications major from Elkins Park, Pa. He is Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His email address is kotloff@theDP.com.

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